Software engineers are just normal people. Our brains are not "special." This (objectively incorrect) mental model of software devs is very harmful if you want to actually understand things going on around you.
People are attracted to things based on their personality traits. The average software engineer is not the same as the average person, because the average person is not attracted to software engineering.
In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.
It's not that software engineers are somehow magical or special, it's that there is a selection bias to become a software engineer. It's extra not special, because the same thing happens for virtually any specialized field. There are famous stereotypes about the personalities of psychologists, for instance.
> In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.
It sounds like a fancy way of saying that people on the spectrum are more likely to become software engineers than some other arbitrary person.
It had occurred to me, but I didn't want to say it that way because I'm not a psychological professional and it seems out of my area of expertise to make that assumption based on my passive observations.
I have software friends and non-software friends. There is no particular correlation. This is some weird flavor of biological essentialism going on here.
In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.
It's not that software engineers are somehow magical or special, it's that there is a selection bias to become a software engineer. It's extra not special, because the same thing happens for virtually any specialized field. There are famous stereotypes about the personalities of psychologists, for instance.