Jeff,

Thanks for that link to Wesner's post, it's interesting stuff. I recently linked to an online "test" for autism which I found interesting due to the kind of questions that it asks and the results, at least for me, seemed quite plausible. I know several people who would score much more highly than I did and I'm sure that as one moves towards that end of the spectrum things get much more challenging, but I quite like where I am, even if it isn't quite "normal". Personally I wouldn't trade my focus and attention to detail for anything, least of all improved social skills ;)

I have to show your post to my wife. I was trying to explain to her the other day how despite my outward appearance of being a totally hip normal sociable likable suave person, I still have certain obsessive compulsive tendencies. Especially when at the computer. ;)

I'm just glad my disorder is socially acceptable.

Bleh.

I've never believed this. I've met lots of perfectly capable, very nice, very normal programmers. I've also met lots of totally dysfunctional, socially inept managers, grocery store clerks, teachers, salespeople, police officers(!), etc.

This is just something that programmers bring up occasionally to make themselves feel better. It's a social case of assessing one's programming skills far above the norm, even though that's probably not true.

Face it, the vast, vast, vast majority of people are, well, average. If we were all dysfunctional, there'd be no human race.

> Face it, the vast, vast, vast majority of people are, well, average. If we were all dysfunctional, there'd be no human race.

I partially agree with this. Clearly computers and geek culture have become somewhat mainstream now, primarily because of the internet.

But that wasn't true in the 60's, 70's or 80's.. page through some of the articles in the Creative Computing archives (the top link) to see what I mean:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000414.html

Off the top of my head, I can name Doctors and Accountants as two professions that contain people even "weirder" than programmers.

> can name Doctors and Accountants as two professions that contain people even "weirder" than programmers.

Really? Do accountants go home and do a bunch of accounting for fun? Do doctors? Somehow I think that's unlikely, but many programmers do exactly this.

Example. For better or worse, I spend nearly every waking hour (almost literally) in front of a computer. I have a hard time imagining accountants going home and cracking open their accounting ledger and sliding on their green visor, you know, 'for fun'.

I think other professional fields *can* be asperger-y, but few as much as computer science.

> Really? Do accountants go home and do a bunch of accounting for fun? Do doctors? Somehow I think that's unlikely, but many programmers do exactly this.

Is this really a sign of Asperger?

I've met some really weird, incredibly introverted docs and accountants. Just because *some* programmers do it for fun doesn't mean they're not socially average.

Not all programmers program after-hours, believe it or not.

I have a very hard time believing point #2 as being relevant. Ever met a woman who loves collecting something? Does that give her Asperger's Syndrome, or something like it? Ever met someone who likes to work on cars? I have friends that can talk for hours about one of their favourite subjects. That makes them weird?

As for point #3, that qualifies as a serious problem. I can't ever imagine any programmer ever being successful treating their job that literally. Code itself is *totally* abstract - it's not real, it lives as magnetic code in a hard drive, for goodness sake. Which is precisely why so many programmers are so inept - it's an incredibly abstract field.

#1 is too subjective to be useful. I once had a manager that couldn't tell someone's mood if you had a display on your forehead that scrolled your mood on it. That gives him Asperger's?

Having been exposed to the academic world during graduate school and later, I think there are plenty of intelligent "weird and obsessive" people outside of software. Any profession where being eccentric isn't detrimental as long as you're highly skilled is fair game: academia, art, music, etc.

"I once had a manager that couldn't tell someone's mood if you had a display on your forehead that scrolled your mood on it. That gives him Asperger's?"

Well, yes, possibly, who knows. I don't follow your logic. Most people are normal, therefore everyone is normal?

Most of the coders I have worked with, including myself, have or do a lot of drugs. Perhaps, given that large quantities of illicit substances are consumed by the most educated folks and by their obviously affluent and highly educated children, perhaps one might be inclined to name ones affliction as a disorder, rather than the consequences of ones actions. This afford one less of a need for emotional response to emotionally charged stimuli, a reason foir ones eccentricity and cannot be so readily discerned by a pee-test ;p

> Particularly common interests are means of
> transport (such as trains), computers, math
> (particularly specific aspects, such as pi),
> wikipedia, and dinosaurs.

Does anybody see a web site in there that looks out of place?

Heh, yeah, it [wikipedia] was removed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Asperger_syndrome&diff=35391920&oldid=35386977

To someone with Asperger Syndrome (AS), it's the rest of the world who are all slightly sick... "our way" seems so much more functional. You've all got this constant obsessing with social status and your position in various groups, inability to concentrate on one thing at at time, excessive show of emotion for the smallest things, and so on.

I am quite happy to have AS and wouldn't want to have it any other way.

http://isnt.autistics.org/

> Well, yes, possibly, who knows. I don't follow your logic. Most people are normal, therefore everyone is normal?

Well, yeah. The only truly average is, well, what a proper sample of the population is like.

Or do you determine "average" the egotistical way - what you consider your own normal behaviours to be?

I still don't follow you. Consider tallness. Most people are around average height. A few people are very short or very tall. Do these short and tall people not exist? Perhaps they are just deluding themselves about their height?

This is a subject I'll be writing on in some depth when I start my blog about mid-year.

The problem with this subject is that there are too many assumptions being made about people being abnormal based on arrogant assumption.

So called 'normal' people can be amazingly dysfunctional - incapable of holding interests other than those prescribed by society, holding that what you want to believe is more important than established facts, 'following the mob', idolising low achievers, undervaluing real accomplishments, being exclusively consumers with no contribution to society and, here's the clincher, *forcing social dysfunction on other people that they cannot relate to by refusing to soc-i-a-l-i-se with them and cruelly ostracising them for their entire childhood for no good reason other than they themselves are too immature to relate to them in any meaningful way*.

I think many people suspected of Asperger's syndrome are actually just intelligent enough to have independent and creative thought and who take an interest in the world around them.

I suspect Asperger's itself is, in this regard, something quite different to the popular image being put about.

It is clear to me that computer programmers evolved with their profession. You do something long enough and you realize that it completely consumed you and you become part of your profession. People have to be carefull about what they do. They eventually become it, whether it is doctors, accountants, programmers, police officers, etc. after doing something long enough. Since programmers require being very specialized and focused on one thing only, it is sort of deviated their personalities. It is a mutution of a sort. People in africa develop immunity to molaria because they are sucepted to it where is if you expose an american to molaria, it will have a fatal consequnces. Therefore if you allow your personality to change because you are not carefull and part of it is fun to be so narrowly focused and completely consumed by the process of programming, the result is social deviation. It is like when you put a frog in a cold water and start boiling the pot of water, the frog will not notice the increase in termperature and will get boiled with water. Similarly programmers when start to code do not notice changes that are happening to them as a result of programming and do not bother changing because it is fun, it gives them a competative edge, makes them feel powerful and superior then other people in some respects and they do not want to give that up. The result, they boil and do not even notice it...

That's me, baby! :-P

> Face it, the vast, vast, vast majority of people are, well, average. If we were all dysfunctional, there'd be no human race.

I could argue that we're well on the way to not being here anymore, thanks in large part to a lot of people being pretty dysfunctional :P. "Average" and "dysfunctional" are not necessarily disjunct.

I converted the Wired Autism Quotient test to be automated - it calculates your score for you.

http://www.MDLies.com/AQ

I must be an Aspie if I went through the trouble of automating the test. :)

This article is probably the best article I've ever read on AS. I've read a lot of them (I have hyperlexia), and this one doesn't use a lot of loaded words that make the disorder sound like a death sentence; it just tells it like it is, which I really appreciate.

Well! I just surfed here from Google on "Bill Gates Aspeger", and it's a fascinating and heartening discussion, as my son was (last week) diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. I'm thinking, based on this article and others like it, of steering my son toward a career in software or engineering...

An organisation exists for people with Asperger Syndrome who work in IT and software engineering. It based in Britain but is willing to work with people from any country. They also run a discussion forum.

http://www.aspergertechnical.org.uk

I made a mistake when I was young and thought engineering would be a cool thing to get into. After graduating and working in the field for almost a decade, I realized that I was wrong. And it's mainly because of the people you end up working with. Anyways I've been in software development for most of my career and I'd have to say that about 2 out of every 10 engineers or software engineers have aspergers. I wouldn't say that they lack the ability to socialize, but when they do socialize, they talk about things that are completely uninteresting, such as intense conversations about Tivo or their computer they have at home. They will come to work early, program intensely all day, and go home late. They rarely ever joke around or talk about anything off the subject of work. The work I do is completely downright boring, and I don't see how someone can maintain an intense focus on it all day long, yet alone for years. But these nerds do. And the managers love these nerds because they are like robots. I like people that are good at what they do, but they can joke around also and have outside interests that aren't computer related. All I have to say is that if you ever have to work around someone like these computer nerds, you get to the point where'd you'd really like to punch one of them in the face for being such nerds. Basically, since computer programming is about the only career next to being a copywriter where desireable traits to have would be autism or aspergers, these nerds always move ahead of you and get promoted ahead of you because they will always do a better job than you. So unfortunately, you end up with one of these nerds as a project lead that is absolutely a complete drag and extremely difficult to work with. They always end up not liking you because they cannot understand why you don't go home at the end of the day and play on your computer and write code all night like they do. And believe it or not, most of these types are always married too. But their wives are always disgusting. So take it from someone that has worked in this day and age in the world of software development. The people that are in this field are the types that got beat up in highschool and grade school a lot, and to tell ya the truth, a lot of them need to keep getting beat up.

IamSoOverMe - okay, so you're a slacker that can't keep up with the rat race. Good luck with that.

RealityStrikes - In the world of engineering, it might be a rat race, but there is no cheese at the end. With the influx of H1B's, corporations have managed to dwindle every engineer's salary and ensure that there will be no rewards, even though the bar gets set higher every year. And I've told other people that aren't engineers that they should be concerned as well. Because the result is that a lot of engineers leave the field and end up taking jobs away from other people in other career fields which in turn creates a surpluss of workers and of course dwindles the salaries of all professions across the board. Not just engineering and computer programming.

Arrr!

Ye should 'ave been a barrister, IAmSoOverMe!

Being the spouse of an serious IT person that spends any free time with his programming manuals than with his family and a mother of a mildly autistic son, I can completely relate to the observations and confusion that faces the "other half" that cannot decipher anything about their spouse. Oddly enough, it was those Asperger's Characteristics that made my spouse very attractive. It also didn't help that the majority of the men on my side of the family are completely brain-dead and Neanderthals! That could have had something to do with it. Hmmmm........ it could make someone wonder.

IAmSoOverMe-
what you describe is classic economics- the law of wages and labor supply. What's interesting is EVERYONE knows this, but they pretend not to. THAT part of it is very interesting.

For instance, Bill Gates (and other Silicon Valley CEOs ) testified before Congress (under oath?) that he cannot find the engineers he needs and immigration should be unlimited for that reason. He knew what was doing, and so did every member of Congress. He wants to flood the labor market to drive down wages, increase workload, decrease benefits, increase profits and , well, get richer.

He knows that's what he's doing, the Congressmen listening to him all knew what he was saying, the newspapers know it, the trade journals and magazines know it, the think tanks and people who write editorials know it, the managers know it, and the economists know it. But everyone pretends they just don't see it. It's as if the fundamental laws of economics went suddenly AWOL . Now, that's interesting.

What this demonstrates is that entire - how can we describe them, call them segments? - of society, that is, all the entities above, independently recognize a situation in which they're called on to "play dumb" and they do it.

Apparently, they all see themselves on Gate's side of the "issue" (if you can call distorting the free market and subsidizing billionaire corporations at the expense of working Americans a "issue"). Furthermore, they are all ready to lie to the American public. The naturalness of their lying implies they consider lying to the American public to be a normal part of their function.

It's just collusion to an agreed-upon non-reality. The players all implicitly understand what's going on and know how to act. It's this society's rich and powerful people fostering a known and provable lie for the purpose of executing public policy which consolidates wealth and power into their hands while taking it out of the hands of the mass of ordinary people.

That, my friends, is called a ruling class. I hate the sound of those words as much as anyone, but what else can you call it? America is a corptocracy. Maybe it always has been. It certainly is now. But the interesting thing is to see all the ducks line up... that is really eye opening.

So let's say the "ruling class" does as you wish and blocks immigration. Doesn't that just make the ruling class bigger? Or do you not care because you are a part of it now?

America is great because of immigration. Just because my family has been here for generations doesn't mean I'm suddenly better than anyone else.

IAmSoOverMe: you're in the wrong job. It could happen to anyone: I happen to be not particularly interested in sports and cars, so I'm not a builder. Neither am I interested in golf, so I'm not an accountant.

valleyprogrammer: if you work for the kind of firm that thinks it can replace good, intelligent people with outsourced / offshore / cheap developers - you're working for the wrong people. This kind of management-by-the-numbers doesn't work for software development, which is (ironically enough) a people business.

a on February 15, 2008 06:03 AM wrote

"...Doesn't that just make the ruling class bigger?

and also wrote

"...I'm suddenly better than anyone else."

The answer to the first question goes like this.

For any system to work, it has to be maintained and regulated. Without that, it falls apart and ceases to be a functioning system.

If you have a valley that is created because you built a dam and you want water to go to new villages, you're not being very clever if you decide one day to blow up that dam and let the water goes wherever it wants and figure that's what nature wants, so let it happen.

If you want water to get to other villages, then you engineer that result and spread prosperity by maintaining that artificial and complicated system. That's what we should be doing, not blowing up the dam.

If any developed country let unlimited immigration happen, then the resultant onslaught of people would destroy that system. For some reason that simple and plain fact is a political hot potato that gets people really mad.

If you want to export prosperity to other nations, you have to engineer that result; destroying the prosperous nations is not going to achieve that end. Driving down wages through immigration is as old as the American railroads bringing over the Chinese because they were disposable, abusable and would work for nearly nothing. All that got us was the railroad robber barons and near-starvation for the rest of the people. We don't need to go there again.

The issue isn't should India and China and everyone else develop their own industries and be helped to do so? Because the answer to that is an emphatic yes. The issue is- should industries be permitted to import unlimited labor just to drive wages down? Does sucking those people out of China and India really help those countries? Let me tell you India doesn't permit unlimited immigration and neither does China and neither does Mexico. There'd be riots in the streets if those governments tried anything like that.

If you want to spread prosperity, then corporations have to be forced to be about something other than just profits. Corporations are just a social construct created by us to encourage a level economic activity which individuals couldn't undertake on their own. The rational for their existence is they serve the larger social good. They have ceased to do that, and have merely become a vehicle for wealth concentration into the hands of a small group of people and countries. That's the problem. Corporations don't care what sort of destruction they leave in their wake, they consider all that stuff to be a so called externality. They will do literally anything and say literally anything to just to make more money. They'll destroy he very earth we all live on and delude themselves into believing it's all for the larger good. That's the power of money. People who fit that description are called sociopaths. Societies and nations can't function for long when those kinds of entities control everything.

Some people think that a near-lawless, unregulated industry is the most efficient and the "free market" , by which they mean unregulated behavior by corporations, will spread prosperity the best.

We already know what happens when there is no regulation on industry and people, and employers are permitted to drive wages, through a constant surplus of labor, down towards zero- it's called 19th century England.

People, to keep from starving, will do literally anything just to live another day.

More recently, in the book Freakanomics, the author reveals that people will work in the highly dangerous illegal drug industry for about, five bucks an hour. Don't kid yourself that deregulation and a libertarian "free" economy will lead to prosperity for anyone but a few people at the top.

Or there's the example of Somolia...a nation currently without a government or any kind of regulation at all....

The answer to all this is that what makes the world livable is the complicated system of laws and regulations which requires attention and thoughtful application to individual circumstances. There is no substitute for dealing with reality in all it's vagarities and twists and turns and cause and effect relationships. You just have to develop that system, piece by piece, lesson by lesson. Society and it's system of laws is the most complicated creation we have. Smashing it apart in some radical way just because some small group of agitators figures that doing so will make them x billions of dollars is a spectactualry bad idea.

I am not against the immigration of people who will compete with me for my job. Some amount of that will result in a bigger pie for everyone, even if I get beaten out for that job. But at some point, it doesn't lead to more economic activity, it leads to less, then less wages, then less good working conditions, then economic destruction of the industry and people's desire to pursue it at all. That's just a basic reality. We have to find that point and set the immigration level to meet it. What that point is is an empirical question- not an ideological one and the answer to it is not "unlimited immigration" and you're not going to get any truth out of the corporations or the think tanks they fund.

Dragging down the living standards of first world nations does nothing to raise the standards of developing countries, it just lowers the bar for everyone. We want to encourage economic activity and reward work. Unlimited immigration does neither.

valleyprogrammer