| Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record. No conspiracy needed. Many people simply do not think about things in sufficient depth to achieve even basic levels of rationality or consistency. They literally just say whatever springs to mind, all the time, acting on something close to instinct. These people end up being wrong about things continuously, but it doesn't matter because the people around them are the same and often don't even notice. People like that react very badly to anyone pointing out that they've made an unambiguous mistake. They aren't used to it and tend to get upset, they may claim it's offensive, get territorial, or try to turn the blame around as you saw there. A very modern defence is to claim that the person who pointed out the mistake is "on the spectrum" i.e. has severe social skills deficiencies. No actual evidence of medical problems is required. We can see this in the article text itself. People with Asperger’s syndrome, the term still commonly used for one of the most well-known forms of autism spectrum disorder, bring serious advantages to the financial markets: extreme focus, a facility with numbers, a willingness to consider unpopular opinions, a strong sense of logic, and an intense belief in fairness and justice. This is a key paragraph because all the qualities cited here are usually understood to be desirable and strongly linked with success. Although this person is describing market traders, you could simply replace "the financial markets" with "tech firms" and it'd still be consistent. It took me quite a few years to really understand this, but huge numbers of people in the workplace (especially outside the tech industry) cannot focus, are afraid of numbers, conflate having an unpopular opinion with being wrong, aren't interested in / don't value logic and don't care at all about fairness or justice in the sense meant here i.e. treating people consistently. And what happens? But, like other autistic employees, they often feel alienated from their managers, colleagues, and clients. Sometimes they simply get fired. Well yeah. That's not a mental disorder. That's how anyone focused, logical and consistent feels when surrounded by people who aren't! The tech world tends to attract a lot of accusations of people being weird/anti-social etc (first time I heard of it in relation to finance). But as the years go by I become more and more convinced it's not really a problem with people in tech. It's really the expected outcome of combining extreme demand for very concrete skills (so the rare people who are genuinely weird behaviour are worth tolerating) with programming machines that require correctness, to the extent that everyone routinely peer reviews each other's work. Go look at how many industries have equivalents to rigorous code review culture, and you'll see it's not many. Even in science it's anonymous strangers reviewing your paper, not your own reports. |