Mastodawn

I've spent my whole career working with neurodivergent people in tech.

Here's to the people who thrive with interrupts, who work best when juggling four different things, are pretty great incident responders, and can code while talking on slack.

Here's to the people who need four uninterupted hours to get anything done, but what they get done is fantastic, and they have the in depth knowledge to explain nuances you didn't even know were there, making them the folk who find the long term remediations after incidents.

Here's to the people who take great joy in picking the lint out of a codebase because it's fun, who refactor for the challenge, who see bad process and ache to get changes in to reduce the friction.

Here's to the people who seem to know everyone, who reach across teams to tap experts who don't get the recognition others do, and work best when working WITH.

Y'all are amazing

SysAdmin1138 Mar 11

I'm pretty much a bit of everything on this list, which makes me a very attractive looking employee. However, I'm not actually a Software Engineer. I'm a mechanic who keeps systems running and can patch software.

Which is a problem these days, because every employer looks to see if you're a Software Engineer before they assess literally anything else. Contracting labor markets are hard on us all.

@sysadmin1138 I feel seen, thank you.

@sysadmin1138 Same, I feel like I’m each of those depending on the day, sometimes that can be really stressful 😅

MatthewToadAgain Mar 13

@sysadmin1138 I've gone from being a software engineer to DevOps. I've told myself that there is a lot of back and forth, but really, software engineering was a bit of a dead end in terms of my wider career goals.

Because my previous job was C++. And nearly everyone who wants C++ is doing something unethical.

MatthewToadAgain Mar 13

@sysadmin1138 I still code a bit - but mostly short stuff in Python or whatever. More often I debug third party software and end up producing a usually relatively small patch ... which we often have to maintain indefinitely, depending on how keen upstream are.

Mx Rey (Fuck ICE) 💜 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 11

@sysadmin1138 THANK YOU 💜

I am in the last two categories and honestly need to figure out how to resume-ify it, because I love it.

I will keep your builds happy, your repositories performant, and know exactly who has the piece of test equipment you need. I test, I debug, I brew coffee, and I will make sure the cursed furby is exactly where it needs to be to keep luck alive. I am a force multiplier. My entrance music is Cake / Short Skirt Long Jacket. You know that weird rattling sound in the HVAC ducts at the office? Leave a ladder out and give me overnight access and it will get fixed and you won't even know.

I'm consistently voted "most likely team member to raise their hand in a meeting and say 'Yeah I have done that before' no matter the topic".

Anyway, I have an entire life of experience making it fucking work. I can't stop doing it. Your weird bugs that shouldn't happen will haunt me 24x7 until the answer comes to me at 3am in the form of a metaphorical dream.

Actually mmhmm I think this is a first draft of a resume

Gwen the Loitering Fox

@rey @sysadmin1138 I had the great joy of meeting someone who is squarely on type 4, she organized a networking meeting with hundreds of people, and while it wasn't focused on work, daily activities would come up, and that just meant that no matter what topic came up, she would know someone to introduce you to, or someone in the right team, and things would just magically get solved. her life was going meeting to meeting, stopping bad ideas and finding the right people to implement the good ideas, and I have no idea how she managed, but holy fuck did she do a good job

I applaud anyone who can do that, you definitely are the glue that keeps any real big project or company afloat!

CassandraVert Mar 13

Apparently resumes are not as common as they used to be. HR doesn't want the deluge. So they go browse around LinkedIn. They ought to come here.

@sysadmin1138 I'm #2 and #3, and I don't work in tech but the (awesome) job I do have has both requirements as well. (Also a bit of management, which I'm not as good at but people are forgiving)

always tired Mar 11

I'm neurodivergent and can't reasonably talk/listen while coding.

Surprise, not all neurodivergent people are the same...

SysAdmin1138 Mar 11

@project1enigma I've worked with *many* of you.

Not for nothing have all the best teams I've been on had Opinions about office overhead lighting.

(In one past company management pointed out they were getting questions about whether the company had enough money based on the missing lights in one part of the office. The difference was visible from the street. The reaction from sysadmins was so vociferous that management never mentioned it again.)

Strfnurfn Mar 12

@zygmyd There was a guy who'd come in at 10:30 every morning and "help" by turning on the lights, raising cries of dismay from the entire engineering section. He could not understand.

Surprised he didn't have a bad office day someday.

theHastyOne Mar 11

@sysadmin1138 I feel so seen by this.. My whole team is represented somewhere in here. Its amazing how differently the same we all are.

@sysadmin1138 This damn near brought me to tears.

nellie-m Mar 13

@wesdym @sysadmin1138

+1

@sysadmin1138 I'm 2 and 3. Thank you!

sunflowerinrain Mar 12

@sysadmin1138
Hurrah for the many and varied! Once upon a time a big company's R&D division had training days to discuss the personality profiles* we'd completed. It was stressed that a good team needed at least one of each type.

After a later invasion of head office (not R&D) control freakery, standardisation was imposed; the people who did the work but didn't fit the company profile didn't get pay rises. Didn't do the company any good.

* Hokum with embedded nuggets of sense

Lori M Olson Mar 12

@sysadmin1138 I’m in the middle two categories. The challenge is figuring out which one every day

neocat_flag_transbian

@sysadmin1138 welp, ig I'm the second one here

Hannah (With a snake problem 🐍)Mar 12

@sysadmin1138 Somehow this one feels seen just a little....

Schneewölfchen 🌨️🐺Mar 12

@sysadmin1138 Four uninterrupted hours sound like a dream nowadays... 🥴

SysAdmin1138 Mar 12

@purplewolfboy These people are REALLY SUFFERING and are the ones most likely to peace out during the day (with their manager's blessing) to focus-code in the evenings.

King Naga Calyo Lucere-Delphi Mar 12

@sysadmin1138 @purplewolfboy Four hours of doing *anything* is about all I've got gas for at this point in my burnt out life but no employer wants someone who can only work half-days. 😞

(I'm not even all that good at computery things. Especially not at what computers have become these days. I've got better mechanical aptitude and I really should chase a career along those lines, but that doesn't stop me from doing *some* code slinging for fun. Just wish I had more free time for it...)

@sysadmin1138 not in tech but have had a rough enough couple of weeks specifically with being neurodivergent at work that i really appreciate getting to read this and recognize some part of myself in it <3

atapi ❤️Mar 13

@sysadmin1138 i'm trying my best to be at least some of these categories, but i am still only a student lol

SysAdmin1138 Mar 13

@sterophonick A little bit of everything works best these days. Big-Corporate wants engineers who can sit on an on-call rotation getting interrupted all day, can attend two meetings a day, can code while having focus blocks of 2-3 hours, can code patches while holding two slack conversations, and networks. And switch between all of these based on day of week.

No one is EVERYTHING, but a little bit of each is needed.

fluffy 💜Mar 13

@sysadmin1138 I'm basically 2 and 3, and was the one who generally knew everything about the systems but didn't get the recognition and really needed #4 in my life (but also I work best when working with)

or at least I was, before I burned the hell out and had to leave tech for my own health and comfort

SysAdmin1138 Mar 13

@fluffy 2+3 is the most frequent combo in the replies. All four are needed to be a healthy team!

nellie-m Mar 13

thank you ❤️

I needed to hear this, 3 days before a deadline with three crazy days ahead

wish me luck

@sysadmin1138 Emergency incident juggler here 🙂 . Thank you and you're welcome.

SysAdmin1138 Mar 13

@hhttg Fist bump of solidarity.

sanguish Mar 13

@sysadmin1138 please frame this and put it in managers offices!

@sysadmin1138 Not to be grim, but this "neurodivergent people have super powers" narrative is also misleading. For every single one of those exceeding neurodivs there are also a bunch of those that got lured into the branch (because allegedly it would be just perfect for certain kinds of neurodivergency) that got driven away by ableism and/or sexism, or that got chronically ill by burnout, chronic trauma, or conditions like long covid

neobot_flag_disabled

SysAdmin1138 6d ago

@gem I didn't have the characters left to counterbalance this with the negatives, like employers want a very specific shape of engineer that only sort of exists. A better environment would be if performance engineering the workforce focused on the *team* not the *individual* there would be way more tolerance for neurodiv folk. But no, it's all focused on consistent performance by individuals.