[kitanata]

I am a Staff Engineer leading a large engineering organization. I am also “on the spectrum” and openly autistic. My co-workers know that I am autistic.

I have found that communicating to business folks and leaders is a skill like anything else and can be taught. Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others is ableist and harmful.

While it is true that people who are autistic struggle to communicate with non-autistic people I would argue it is also difficult for non-autistic people to communicate with autistic people.

It is also ableist to assume that just because someone lacks communication skills that they are “on the spectrum”.

What is true is that communication as a skill is not often taught to developers.

[BurningFrog]

> Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others...

As anyone can see, I did not write that.

[mason55]

It was such a perfect illustrative response because your post said nothing of the sort and in fact explained how anyone can pick up the skill

[disgruntledphd2]

I'm not sure about that. Communication is hard when words associated with specific emotional valence get involved. For the responder, I'd suspect that on the spectrum is one of those phrases.

I think what makes this stuff difficult is that the same word can trigger wildly different responses.

As an example, I've been working from Ireland for US multinationals for a while now. In Ireland, the word stupid means bad or crap but doesn't have a massive emotional valence.

In the US based tech side however, it was literally the worst thing one could say, I suspect because people were identifying with their ideas.

Same word, multiple different meanings lead to communication problems.

[runald]

The word completely does over-assert that quote, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the quote does not follow from your overall point. People with good "theory of mind" would supposedly read between the lines, but I guess it was never that simple. Spoiler alert: there's no such thing as one true generalized theory of mind.

[mirror_neuron]

GP is using “theory of mind” as a technical term with a specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

[BurningFrog]

Reading between the lines is a whole different thing.

"Theory of mind" means, among other things, having a good mental model of what other people know and don't know.

Obviously, without understanding what piece of information the other person is missing, it's very hard to explain it to them.

[gilbetron]

> I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mind" capabilities. People without that will just assume people know what they know, and proceed to fail at communicating with those who don't.

The OP overstated things, but it isn't completely wrong to conclude the basic idea from your above statement.

Also, the OP did not say you wrote it, so maybe being less pedantic would help the situation.

[beckingz]

The parent comment said that non-autistic people often assumed that people knew what they knew and failed to communicate.

[quietbritishjim]

I think maybe you misread "People without that will just assume people know what they know..." to mean "without autism" but it actually meant "without a good theory of mind [as is often the case for autistic people]"