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How Microsoft, Dell and Other Large US Employers Accommodate Neurodivergent Employees (nytimes.com) 53
As the number of autism diagnoses rises in America, a number of large employers "are taking steps to make workplaces more accessible and welcoming for neurodivergent employees," reports the New York Times — including Microsoft, Dell and Ford. [Alternate URL here.]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 36 8-year-olds in the United States has autism. That's up from 1 in 44 in 2018 and 1 in 150 in 2000, an increase that experts attribute, in part, to better screening. In addition, 2.2% of adults in the country, or 5.4 million people, are autistic, according to the CDC...
Autism activists have praised companies that have become more accepting of remote work since the coronavirus pandemic. Workplaces with too much light and noise can overwhelm those who are autistic, leading to burnout, said Jessica Myszak, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who specializes in testing and evaluations for autism. Remote work "reduces the social demands and some of the environmental sensitivities" that autistic people struggle with, Myszak added.
The article notes Microsoft's neurodiversity hiring program, which was established in 2015. The company's program was modeled after a venture created by the German software firm SAP, and has since been adopted in some form by companies including Dell and Ford. The initiative has brought in about 300 full-time neurodivergent employees to Microsoft, said Neil Barnett, the company's director for inclusive hiring and accessibility. "All they needed was this different, more inclusive process," Barnett said, "and once they got into the company, they flourished."
[One job applicant] was given a job coach to help her with time management and prioritization. Microsoft also paired her with a mentor who showed her around the company's campus in Redmond. Perhaps more important, she works with managers who have received neurodiversity training. The Microsoft campus also has "focus rooms," where lights can be dimmed and the heights of desks can be changed to fit sensory preferences. Employees seated in the open office may also request to sit away from busy aisles or receive noise-canceling headphones.
Autism activists have praised companies that have become more accepting of remote work since the coronavirus pandemic. Workplaces with too much light and noise can overwhelm those who are autistic, leading to burnout, said Jessica Myszak, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who specializes in testing and evaluations for autism. Remote work "reduces the social demands and some of the environmental sensitivities" that autistic people struggle with, Myszak added.
The article notes Microsoft's neurodiversity hiring program, which was established in 2015. The company's program was modeled after a venture created by the German software firm SAP, and has since been adopted in some form by companies including Dell and Ford. The initiative has brought in about 300 full-time neurodivergent employees to Microsoft, said Neil Barnett, the company's director for inclusive hiring and accessibility. "All they needed was this different, more inclusive process," Barnett said, "and once they got into the company, they flourished."
[One job applicant] was given a job coach to help her with time management and prioritization. Microsoft also paired her with a mentor who showed her around the company's campus in Redmond. Perhaps more important, she works with managers who have received neurodiversity training. The Microsoft campus also has "focus rooms," where lights can be dimmed and the heights of desks can be changed to fit sensory preferences. Employees seated in the open office may also request to sit away from busy aisles or receive noise-canceling headphones.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:1, Troll)
The job market is in the dumpsters because most companies are top-heavy and over-pay their C-level people, who really don't give a sh*t about the company, the product or the employees.
Not because they higher a highly intelligent person who has social issues and has difficulties with sensory input.
Your anger is with the wrong people.
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Not because they higher a highly intelligent person who has social issues and has difficulties with sensory input.
Or difficulty with homophones?
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YEAH! Throw them off a high cliff the moment they are diagnosed, like they used to do in the olden days.
Just ignore the fact that for the low low price of a bit of peace and quiet, you get employees that will stay in the company for the next 30 years, working overtime as a fun challenge and creating designs and implementations where all edge cases are either carefully excluded or thoroughly tested.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you have never met a person on the spectrum. They have the same emotions as you and many of them are very intelligent, maybe not in all fields, sometimes they are imensly engineering, science or art. Knowing many neurodiverse people, I'd rather work with them than a neurotypical, less of the work place BS, usually they are very straight forward.
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sometimes they are imensly engineering, science or art
Even if they're not "imensly" with language skills, one presumes. He's just making the point for a friend, though.
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You seem to have confused autism with psychopathy.
Psychopaths are drawn to corporate America, concentrating in the executive suites, which the tismatics stay far away from.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:1)
Psychopaths display a lack of empathy because your emotions don't resonate with them; they can't see why some things are important to you if they're not important to themselves.
People with autism more often demonstrate a lack of empathy because they don't stop to think about your feelings. They can usually learn to do this though. https://www.frontiersin.org/jo... [frontiersin.org]
This has been life-changing information as I work with a lot of administration folks. Determining which is which helps to guide communication str
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People with autism more often demonstrate a lack of empathy because they don't stop to think about your feelings. They can usually learn to do this though.
FWIW, I have high functioning autism, and your take is correct. Functioning at work for me involves continuous active thinking about, among other things, people's feelings. Staying conscious about it is most of the battle, for me. But if I don't focus on it, if I get lazy, I slip back into my natural ways of acting and perceiving.
The abstract you linked to blames "problems with cognitive perspective-taking" for the autistic lack of empathy. Sounds exactly right. I have to actively shape my cognition to kee
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But back to the original poster, who wondered about who might be "willing to do all sorts of heinous shit"... Normal people are willing to do all sorts of heinous shit. I forget the name of the study back in the 1950s where they hired test subjects to "work" as "technicians" administering electric shocks to people, finding that a slim majority of the general American public would be willing to shock someone to death, when an authority figure commands it.
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Aside from specific technical talents they may hav
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It's also worth considering that the companies in question may be actively interested, not backed into a corner by regulation
No, it's not. It wasn't until after legal protection was granted that the companies acted. It's not charitable to assume they'd "really been meaning to hire some autistic folks but just forgot" until forced, that's just stupid.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:1)
These companies are going to hire intelligent people who are on the spectrum, not a guy that sits in the corner drooling on themselves laughing because a sock is on crooked.
The people they will hire will match if not exceed they typical employee, but instead of taking a smoke break, will chill somewhere, or need a dimmer, quieter space to work. Seriously who couldn't use some of that? If anything, the neurotypical employee is the dummy, they aren't smart enough to get a better work situation.
Re:Oh for fuck's sake (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that it's easier and more fun to pat yourself on the back for being 'inclusive' than it is to take a good hard look at the fact that you've created and continue to tolerate a basically intolerable environment for all but the most unfocused and outgoing stimulus junkies and expect people to focus hard in it; but that doesn't make it less crazy.
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The only open offices work is if everyone is really quiet all the time. This makes collaboration actually somewhat harder than more traditional setups.
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I have data to suggest that is untrue.
I worked as a software dev for 20+ years in an open office team of ~300 people with a huge range of talents. We had rooms people could move to when they wanted more isolation, and headphones were common, but in general, it was a common space with ongoing communications where you could typically hear conversations within a couple desks of range. We had a second ~200-person team at the same company that had a mix of individual cubes and closed offices. We continuously com
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I mean that sounds moderately functional. You didn't have another team unrelated to yours decide to put on music for the millionth time, because who doesn't want music while they work.
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True. I don't recall anyone ever putting on music outside of headphones the whole time I worked there. It was pretty respectful that this was a place to get work done. We had plenty of non-work discussions, but those would generally move off to side quickly.
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It wasn't a lack of respect so much as sharing an open office with a different org doing completely different work not even understanding why it's a problem.
I don't agree with the general premise that every dev should be isolated away in a sound proofed box. Those overheard conversations and collaboration do work well.
I've sadly never worked anywhere with big open plan offices that have done it well.
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substandard
Having a unique set of challenges =/= "substandard" in of itself. Case in point: Practically any neurodivergent person who EXCELLED and innovated because their employee wasn't a moron, and understood the benefit of helping their employees out (within reason, obviously).
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking as a person who has a son who's on the spectrum a cousin, worked with several people who are neurodivergent and spend a ton of time with other kids of all abilities. You have no idea what you are talking about.
My 9 year old son for example can do circles around the average college grad in math and deeply understands many engineering principles, stuff that many know in a text book way, but not fully understand it.
I have a friend, who served 12 years in the U.S. Marines with Aspergers, was an great t
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as a person who has a son who's on the spectrum a cousin, worked with several people who are neurodivergent and spend a ton of time with other kids of all abilities. You have no idea what you are talking about.
And speaking as someone who's autistic, you don't seem to know what you're talking about. There's a common saying that when you've met one autistic person . . . you've met only one autistic person. The way it manifests in everyone is wildly different. Autism is a collection of dissimilar diagnoses from one person to another. Autism is "I dunno, it must be autism." From an NT perspective, the GP is correct.
My 9 year old son for example can do circles around the average college grad in math and deeply understands many engineering principles, stuff that many know in a text book way, but not fully understand it.
I have a friend, who served 12 years in the U.S. Marines with Aspergers, was an great tech in the civilian world and now is a very excellent Senior Director in a tech company, the kind of Director that fully understands what each person's job is, and had stepped out of his office to give a hand to fill a tech position, with out expecting a pat on the back, JUST BECAUSE.
Autism is not a superpower. People who suck at something often avoid that thing and learn to find things they're good at. Glad your people could manage that. A lot of people can't.
Autism is also not a disability. It's a difference. There are many kinds of differences in humans, some we acknowledge and most we don't. Anyone who can't get along with people, anyone who has violent tantrums or completely freezes up, has more than just autism. Sorta the same way that hate crimes were already crimes, those autistic "incidents" were already "incidents," but the NT brain police want us to think it's extra-special-bad because we're abnormal.
Also, a whole bunch of us think it's really, incredibly offensive to label us with a Nazi's name like Asperger, who sent many of us to our deaths. It would be like calling twins "people with Mengele's Syndrome" because Mengele is known for hideous experiments on twins.
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I'm AuDHD, and can concur. Sure, there are things I'd like to "cure", like my face- and time-blindness, and my executive functioning which is shite on a good day.
But there are other aspects of my so-called "disability" that you'll have to pry out of my cold, dead fingers. My affinity for routine makes me a natural at designing development processes that have the right amount of QA and accountability built in, while minimizing the amount of BS paperwork the developers and testers have to do. Also, a well-tim
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Dunno if I am or not, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
...the classic, typical "office environment" drives me up a wall, always has, always will.
I do'nt care if it's 1950's or 2010's open floor plans, or the 80's - 2000's (and now coming back) cube farms, I loathe them all.
Noise-cancelling headsets have to rank up there with the most significant inventions of man.
That it took a pandemic to open the managers / owners / top bosses to even consider letting people work from home is shameful.
I don't think I'd be a live today had the pandemic not happened. 2020 me was about to have an aneurysm with office life and the commute.
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we need a new plague - Dwight Schrute
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Can't wear a mask now because you get perceived *extra hard* by people throwing glares.
Parenthetically, that part really gets me.
I still mask most places, as I've enjoyed not having my 1 - 3 respiratory illnesses a year. And yes, now you get the glares, everyone silently saying "didn't you get the memo? That's not done anymore."
The masking was never about "the science"; not for 99.99% of people. It was about herd behavior and social signaling.
You could just start your own company (Score:2)
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He didn't start any companies. He co-founded a couple, like X/Paypal early on, but he bought his way into Tesla and SpaceX. He basically bought his way into being a co-founder of Tesla by pushing out another co-founder (they eventually settled, but Tesla was founded without Elon Musk).
Granted, Elon Musk's money did lubricate a lot of development, but they were companies that Musk invested in more than started.
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Hint: they really don't (Score:1)
They put them in out of the way teams and places where they can insulate against the HR problems that inevitably result.
When one somehow slips through the hiring process and shows up on a team that's actually expected to produce or function under pressure, or one under any kind of public scrutiny, they disappear real quick.
Saw it happen several times in Microsoft country. The one exception was an old-timer who was such a terrifying savant at manual Assembler optimization that they literally couldn't get rid
Too much stimulation (Score:4, Insightful)
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I once worked in an office where they had the radio on all day, and a fair bit of banter. Next door was a workshop where they had another radio, on a different station. I thought it would drive me insane, but it actually ended up being okay because my brain could just sort of filter the background noise.
I also enjoyed a quiet office, at least until my tinnitus came back. Now I have an air purifier on all the time, not least because of the white noise it provides.
Re: Too much stimulation (Score:2)
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Thanks. I made some recordings when I was travelling on trains in Japan. Just let the phone record some background noise. Sometimes I use that instead of white noise.
Amazon? (Score:1)
Hire people with autism as drivers? I've heard they're excellent [youtube.com].
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Well, today you've learned something new. The autism spectrum is essentially the nerd spectrum. You have different varieties of nerds, who geek out over different topics, can't talk to girls (or anyone), and do their own idiosyncratic various weird habits.
Microsoft has always been neurodivergent-friendly (Score:2)
Hell, most of its CEOs were complete psychopaths.
Cynically (Score:2)
Meaningless term (Score:2)