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Tech Giant SAP Seeks To Hire More Autistic Adults (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: In May 2013, SAP launched its Autism at Work program, with the goal of recruiting and hiring 'hundreds of people' with autism worldwide. Now the company is expanding the program, and is looking to have people on the autism spectrum make up 1 percent of its total workforce (~650 people) by 2020, says José Velasco, head of the Autism at Work program at SAP. So far, autistic workers fulfill all kinds of roles in IT — from software testing, data analysis, quality assurance to IT project management, graphic design, finance administration and human resources, Velasco says, and the potential for new roles is expanding rapidly.
If you're looking for peeps on the spectrum, you came to the right place.
http://archive.wired.com/wired...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biome...
How about they just hire whoever is best qualified for the job, regardless of gender, skin color, age, or brain function? Just give everyone an equal chance? Is that too hard?
The main problem is HR that should be anti-discrimination is the biggest discriminator. If you have dirty clothes and tattoos that might "reflect badly" on the company you've got no chance. Same with autistics that they think belong moving boxes in the warehouse so they don't upset the girls in marketing.
I read this as, "Let's hire first-world developers, and give them non-stop coding work for 100 hour weeks. They love this sort of thing, so it's a win-win! And, we don't even have to pay them as much since they're just working constantly!"
Actually, if it's not an exploitative relationship, why not encourage autistic hiring in development? It's a good counter-point to the recent hyper-social brogrammer style startup environment, where autistic tendencies would be frowned upon. SAP's a perfect test case for this as well -- anyone who has worked even on the periphery of an SAP implementation can attest to the insane system architecture and massive tower of layered code that's built up.
I'm "normal" but tend toward the introverted side, like most "classical" IT guys and developers. It is nice to see some effort to cater to people who aren't natural-born communicators.
This program by SAP seems to be very similar to the very successful program that has been used by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, RBS, Credit Suisse etc. The only variation seems to be, SAP is seeking people with autism related disorders. The pioneering companies mentioned earlier exclusively recruited people with psychopathy, narcissistic disorders, extreme apathy and similar disorders. It has been going on for so long the top management consists entirely of people with these afflictions, often multiple afflictions. Their "alumni" who have left for other companies have created similar hiring and promotion programs in other companies that the entire top echelon of Fortune 500 companies consists of these psychopaths.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That will drastically reduce errors
As someone who grew up with a diagnosis, and has worked as a software developer/team lead for 15 years, getting paid well, and even promoted into architect roles... I am super lucky that I focused on being able to "pass" early on.
Though I am hired and paid and valued based on the skills that I have which are related directly to my diagnosis, I would never tell a perspective employer that I have the dreaded 'tism. Passing is much more lucrative, and even when I have a lower technical skill level than other members of my repressed class, I manage to make more money than them, because I can talk to management.
I highly recommend "business" books such as "Hug your customers" and other trendy MBA type books. Business interaction isn't nearly as hard as say high school, or social gatherings, because business interactions have specific enumerated rules, that have been written down, and are generally agreed upon. This is a boon for Autistic people trying to have successful careers because that means we don't have to rely on an instinct that is present in others but not us. Business interactions are already scripted, and working a script is significantly easier than navigating unspoken social protocol.
I applaud SAP for this initiative, but I urge working autistic adults to eliminate their own need for such programs by spending time learning the protocols of business, it is similar in scale to learning the rules to Magic the Gathering, but way more financially rewarding.
SAP is probably not hiring people who can pass as neurotypical in this program.
that is my point. It is a great program, but an autistic person who is hired outside of this program will be much less of a second class citizen, making it a much more financially desirable thing to pass as NT.
Although it would be way less exhausting, and possibly worth the hit to your paycheck to not have to constantly watch your Ps and Qs, and to just let your Aut-flag fly all day. It just comes down to why you work. I work for money. I would prefer to do something I am good at and something interesting, but I wouldn't work at all if I didn't need money, so the thing that gets me the most money is the thing that I am going to do. It will not put a premium on comfort over money, that is nonsense.
LOL, OK, on behalf of those of us without a clinical diagnosis, but craptacular human interaction skills ... for the love of god, please tell us where these rules are written down.
Nobody told me there was a frickin' manual for this stuff.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
eh, I think I could probably get a lot more done and be a lot happier if I didn't have to bother passing, so it would be nice if telling an employer that I'm autistic was as simple as explaining that I'm left handed.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Multitasking in computer security can be somewhat dangerous. If you have multiple terminal windows open, the reboot command to reboot a workstation may get executed in the wrong terminal window and reboot a server with 50+ users. An incident my new coworker went through recently. Most users are understanding, but some are not.
You're confusing the InfoSec community with the typical Fortune 500 user base.
Ok so this is it, lets say you are a developer. Your boss, the "business people," the users of the software, the QA team, those are your customers. Secondary to writing code, you are a sales person, and your product is "please keep paying me money to write code" These are the fluffy, piece of shit MBA books that I live my work life by: Raving Fans
Hug your customers
I used to use a different book for Meetings, but this one is way better, and is even styled as if it is some sort of science: Powerfully Simple Meetings: Your Guide For Fewer, Faster, More Focused Meetings
There are literally millions of books about how to deal with business people, I don't think it even really matters which ones you read. None are written for autistic people, but that is a good thing. Hug your customers is like a movie script for dealing with unreasonable people, which is mostly what you run in to if you think purely logically/logistically.
Also, if you put these on your bookshelf in your office/cubicle next to the programming books, EVEN IF YOU NEVER READ THEM, it will increase the non-technical people's opinion of you by a significant amount.
...they're going to be responsible for the user interface.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Good grief. Trying to get anything done is SAP is already a nightmare. Now they're going to give their convoluted instructions to people who will, sorry for the wording, mindlessly follow them to the bitter end and claim everything is okay?
I used to joke that for being a German company, SAP didn't make very efficient software. I can only imagine how much worse it will now become.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Oh yeah, because that's been working really swell.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is a party in my head, and I wish I could invite anyone, but then again, I guess I'd not feel too comfortable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm not sure if it's hard, per se, so much as it has an unsavory feel to it, particularly if manipulation is involved. That's why sociopaths do well as business leaders.
Simon Baron-Cohen breaks empathy into two parts: cognitive (understanding people's thoughts) and affective (a desire to act appropriately). Autistics have functional affective empathy, but difficulty with cognitive empathy, while sociopaths have functional cognitive empathy, but little affective empathy. I think a lot of business culture, especially at higher levels, is driven by the ability to act without affective empathy. So it's not so much that the social rules are complex as much as they are disgusting.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That's an inspiration for us all.
Is the "us" in your statement referring to dickheads, people who break shit, people who inflate their own egos, or people who circle jerk? Or are you, as I suspect, all four?
This.
Even having to spend time with people I cannot "turn off" (by closing a window) is stressful to me. Especially if they want something from me, like an answer. My mind is usually a mile past the problem they're currently discussing, so coming up with an answer on the spot is anything but trivial for me. To stay in a single conversation demands more concentration than any "sane" person can possibly imagine.
There is no possible price tag you could stick to something like this.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You ALWAYS - ALWAYS - ALWAYS - validate what system you're on and where you're running before you reboot.
If you don't multitask and focus on one system at a time, you avoid rebooting the wrong system.
Also - if your sysadmins are rebooting *workstations*? You're doing it way, way wrong. A single user workstation should be rebooted by the user themselves.
If the workstation is in a pending reboot and no user is logged into the workstation, I reboot the workstation.
Do you go around in the evenings and power off peoples' laptops before they leave for hte day,
Corporate policy requires that users log off their workstations at the end of the work day. A corporate policy that most users routinely disregard. Since most users start work at 7:00AM, we have a 6:00PM to 8:00PM maintenance window that may initiate a reboot. Also, all workstations are rebooted on Sunday night.
I doubt they are after those who are truly autistic, my guess is that they want the aspergers (functional autistic). Aspergers are known to have an attention to detail and focus on what they are doing that the current generation of developers do not have even under effect of pure caffeine, then you have better chances of having a good code in boring (but fundamental) cases that the teeny "rockstars" do not want to come close even with long sticks.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Reposting the same comment doesn't make it correct a second time.
I thought this was a huge error in the Matrix- they should have been using the people's brains as 'cores' to actually run the matrix in which they were trapped. Could of added a lot of interest instead of the idiotic human battery thing....
love is just extroverted narcissism
The comments for this article ae slow on the uptake.
I am generally not in favor of quotas but when it comes to people with disabilities I think we should do all we can to help them get engaged in the workforce. The key is to find a job where that individual will be given the chance to excel. Just sayin.
"...the goal of recruiting and hiring 'hundreds of people' with autism" Yeah, that explains a lot about their user interface.
Is this an advert? Looks like this "news" is in the ./ rotation. It comes up every now and then.
What part of "no user is logged into the workstation" don't you understand? A user who is already logged out of the workstation is not going to lose data.
Here is what you should do. Get off your arse, start eating right and exercising and find a way to make new friends in the "real world". For me, that was by going to church and becoming involved in the Alpha course. Through that course, I learned more about the faith, met some great new people and I was able to completely surrender the portion of my life that should be a source of strength but was the source of my hurt and weakness to God. He removed my fear and replaced it with a spirit (holy spirit) of boldness.
After years of bullying by schoolmates, my alcoholic father and other things, my psyche was pretty much shredded. I needed to surrender that last part of my life that I was holding back from god which was my relationships and hopes for relationships.
After I did that, my social anxiety went away, I made friend after friend and I might even end up finding a soulmate now. I went from a wallflower who hardly knew anyone at my church after attending for years to someone who worked the room going from table to table greeting people I had met at a retreat at a recent party.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
why dont you just talk to girls, its not that hard
I was 35 before anybody told me that someone asking, "How are you" as part of a greeting doesn't actually want to know. Yes, I had to be told.
You really think the complex nuances of establishing potential relationships is 'not that hard' for someone that struggles with as basic a human interaction as that?
Because after you perform enough, the act isn't rehearsal, it's natural.
Bullshit. I have to consciously remind myself to ask about someone's poorly child. I frequently think, "I'd better say because that's expected now" even though it's pissing me off by extending the conversation in a direction I just don't give a shit about. I put a lot of effort into almost every single conversation in the office - indeed, the only easy conversations are the ones with people that exhibit severe symptoms for Aspergers.
I discussed this with medical professionals and they felt I should inform my employer.
I haven't told anybody I work with. Some of them have clearly figured it out anyway, but have never asked or explicitly discussed it.
I did inform the HR department, but under clear instructions they weren't permitted to tell my managers. As I said to them, I was employed to do a job and it's fair to assess me against my performance in doing that job. I want the managers to have the same expectations of me that they would of other employees, and I'm happy to work to meet those expectations.
At this company (which I joined before diagnosis) it's working superbly. The only reason HR have been informed is in case the shit that's happened to me at previous companies happens again - with the benefit of hindsight I could've taken three different employers to tribunal for discrimination. At my current company I'm adopting approaches, working patterns, ways of working and decades of coping mechanisms to avoid any of that shit in the first place. Just knowing the underlying cause of the disconnects that caused the problems means I can compensate, adjust and focus the attention on the shit I do well, and minimise the negative impacts of the shit I just can't do.
Going public would merely cause everybody to instinctively treat me differently. That may help or hinder, and it may indeed change general perceptions, but it would also put me under a social spotlight that - oddly enough - I'm not equipped to manage.
They don't want to be told? From reading these comments it seems like a bunch of people who feel forced by society to act a certain way whining about it. I don't see what it has to do with autism. If you don't want to know about someone's sick kid (to one of the other posts), don't freaking ask. That's disingenuous and some people can tell. If someone asks you "how are you" and doesn't really want to know, why are you having a conversation with them in the first place?
Nobody is FORCING us to go out and make friends with every douchebag and bastard we meet.
I wouldn't recommend it. It's not terribly good.
Maybe people that aren't classed as having ASD or Aspergers find it interesting, scary or insightful. I found it pretty dull and quite dreadful, and got very irritated with the internal monologue of the protagonist.
can't hold more than 1 variable in play at a time in their limited brains
No wonder you're posting AC, registering for an account would require a modicum of intelligence which you've amply demonstrated you're sadly lacking.
It's ok, I'm sure you're a nice person anyway.
Incidentally have you considered that when you're talking to someone with Aspergers that they're concurrently processing the conversation with you, an internal dialogue examining your body language, an internal dialogue processing what you're saying to try and assess whether it's what you actually mean, another conscious examination of possible responses and which would be appropriate and very probably thinking through the complex problem that they'd have solved already if you hadn't walked over and asked your stupid fucking question in the first place.
1 variable my arse.
I have to pass in the workplace. That doesn't mean I try to pass everywhere. That's one of the best parts about solitude, I don't have to meet anybody's expectations but my own, which I can assess much more reliably.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you think that a lifetime of substituting cognition for intuition to cope with social bullshit doesn't give one the ability to juggle variables, I'm afraid you are the 'retarded idiot'. Also I think the people to which you are referring are not 'savants' (I don't think you know what that word means) but just garden variety idiots. A savant can hold 1,000,000 variables, scopes and branching conditionals in their head, it's just that none of them have to do with whatever dumb shit you are talking about and they just desperately want to get away from you.
If you're so great at computing, what can you show us you've done that's good that reputable others spoke highly of?
Show us something you've done that reputable others in the art and science of computing said is good then
Oh shit is there a council of elders of 'computing' that I never knew about? How will I ever be taken seriously until they speak highly of my things that they say are good? Are they the ones that taught you to talk right by using words and think good stuff?
I'm quite convinced that you are a troll or some kind of idiot Turing test gone off the rails, but I can't resist: who are these reputable people that were supposed to review my work before it was sold worldwide as a critical part of energy infrastructure reliability and automation? Is everybody in danger?
Argh! I don't want to feed the troll but I so want to know what 'his' (your) idea of 'showing' good 'computing' is! C'mon - give us a taste! I assume from your incredibly odd and specific language that you must have done some amazing things in the world of computing that have been spoken of most highly by reputable people in the art (or you are suffering from some kind of aphasia, I can't tell for sure).. Lay it on me! Allow me to learn from this crushing defeat by getting a glimpse of true computing genius in all of its reputably regarded glory!
Seriously though - I think you may be even further down the spectrum than I am. Just, you know, without the smart bits.
Or, you could be a responsible professional, and validate what you're about to do, before you do it.
The best way to do that is to focus on one task at a time. Getting it right the first time is more important than getting it done fast.
Of course, if you like perpetually chasing jobs that are being offshored to mindless drones in India, that's fine.
My job requires a U.S. security clearance. Not too many Indians have one of those. My contract is also fully funded for the next four years.
Most professional sysadmins would write automation to handle this for them.
My department handles all the stuff that can't be automated. For example, a workstation that the user refuses to log out of has an up time of 30+ days, doesn't have the latest security patches installed, and won't automatically reboot over the network. Either the user reboots the workstation or I'll set a 60-minute timer for a forced reboot. Either way, the workstation is getting rebooted.
Thanks for letting us all know which camp you're in.
I belong to Camp Big Bucks, getting paid to do the jobs that no one else wants.
It looks like the Americans with Disabilities Act only prohibits discriminating against people with disabilities, and not discriminating for them. I didn't see any mention of outlawing discriminating for people with disabilities (see Sec. 12112. Discrimination, here.)
Really? Who told you that? Usually, they do want to know, at least a little, and a quick answer to the question is what they want. It's important to note, however, that they don't ask "How are you, and why do you feel that way, and could you tell me about the past few days of your life leading up to this?" They really don't care that much.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
If someone asks you "how are you" and doesn't really want to know, why are you having a conversation with them in the first place?
Welcome to society, where "Hi, how are you?" is a greeting and "Hi, I'm good, how are you?" is the expected response.
Maybe you can get through an entire fucking day without walking into a room (or being in one someone else walks into) or walking past someone, or bumping into someone for the first time that day. I generally can't, especially at work, and in this country "Hi, how are you?" isn't a conversation, it's a societal norm.
Nobody is FORCING us to go out and make friends with every douchebag and bastard we meet.
No, just giving us a fuckton of shit if we don't obey societal norms.
I don't see what it has to do with autism. If you don't want to know about someone's sick kid (to one of the other posts), don't freaking ask. That's disingenuous and some people can tell.
Fuck me, are you dense or autistic?
Functioning in 'normal' society requires conformance to certain norms. Autistic people don't necessarily notice that shit. They don't do it out of instinct, or at all.
I could ignore someone's divorce, poorly child, crashed car, other sources of stress. I could ignore their birthday, promotion, lottery win, other sources of happiness. I frequently do. But I get a better response and a better relationship and a more constructive engagement with them if I do the bullshit smalltalk and fake interest up front before moving onto the topic of conversation that's made me talk to them in the first place.
Is that them being a douchebag or bastard? No, it's them having an implicit understanding, acceptance and expectation of conversational norms and a level of disconnect with people that don't follow them.
My point was that this is shit that people with Aspergers have to explicitly think about. It doesn't come naturally, no matter how much you practice it.
Maybe some people can tell. Even then, they know you at least fucking tried. What's the alternative? Walk around being called weird, being called a douchebag or a bastard, being called insensitive, being called antisocial? Sure, that's an option. It's also a massive barrier to building friendships, relationships, a career..
Personally, I've impressed various companies enough so that they give me a lot of paychecks for typing on their computers. Since a company can't make money employing me unless I produce a lot more value than I'm paid, I consider that evidence of being productive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Just as long as these people are not exploited for their talents (extreme case, see "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex", episode 11) and are treated as any other worker, sounds good to me.
For the record, I was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded due to an diagnosed hearing lost, spent eight years in special ed being treated like an idiot, skipped high school, and went to college. I'm a little bit sensitive.
News flash: Most people don't talk in words, they use "Sound symbols" that just sound like words. It's like ships passing, sending light flashes or signal flags to get a response so that they know the other ship sees them and won't collide with them (probably).
Or, like secret agents giving a code word and getting a counter-sign word. it is not meant to be taken literally.
Just give the expected sign/countersign and they will be able to avoid stress. It's much easier that way.
By the way, these signal words are different in different areas. When you go somewhere, listen for the sign/countersign that is in use and copy it.
(There are other things to pick up on, too. But they are beyond the scope of this discussion.)