Last Wednesday I went to a monthly meetup for neurodivergent professionals. It’s a space to compare notes on how we actually work, and I came away with more to think about than I expected.
Some context first. I’m on the spectrum. When I was a kid, nobody had a name for it. I have letters from a child psychologist in the mid 80s saying I was different, which wasn’t news to anyone, least of all me. I suspect NZ just hadn’t seen enough cases yet. The name that eventually came along was Asperger’s, and it’s still the one I use. It took a family member’s diagnosis, decades later, for me to recognise it in myself. Once I had the name, I could stop treating it as something to hide and start working out how to use it.
Here are the bits from Wednesday I want to keep.
The number that stopped me
Someone brought up JPMorgan Chase’s Autism at Work programme. In one tech role, people hired through it were 90 to 140% more productive than colleagues who’d been doing the same job for five to ten years. With zero errors.
I always knew we could produce a lot when we got room to focus. I’d just never seen anyone put a number on it.
To be fair about the fine print: that’s one role, at one bank, doing work that’s easy to measure. It isn’t a law of nature, and plenty of autistic people are tired of seeing it on every diversity slide deck.
There’s another side to that focus, too. Running at full intensity all day has a cost, and ignoring it is how a lot of us end up in autistic burnout. For me, it shows up as a real need to unwind at the end of the day. I love my bus or train ride home. It’s an hour where I can unfocus. By the time I get off, I’ve put the day in the right frame and filed it away.
Still, the numbers match what I’ve seen, and the less-quoted finding interested me more.
JPMorgan also found people in the programme picked up new skills fast. Their favourite example is someone who learned Java over a weekend.
That one I recognise, with an asterisk. When I joined ICT, access control was a completely new domain to me, and I struggled. There were a lot of interconnected parts and a whole vocabulary of industry terms, and because I wasn’t hands-on with the hardware, I couldn’t learn it by poking at it. The two that took longest to click were mobile credentials, where a phone acts as your access card, and the Protege GX thick client. They’re now the areas people come to me with.
So not a weekend. But once something has my attention, I don’t let go of it.
JPMorgan’s own video on the programme is below. Fair warning: it’s very corporate.
JPMorgan Chase on its Autism at Work programme.
Working for head pats
One theme kept coming up. We’re very happy working on our own. Give us a problem and some room, and we’ll go deep. But most of us also like knowing we’re on the right track.
Someone called it working for head pats. Someone else said gold stars. That’s me. I’m comfortable digging into areas I don’t know well and keeping going without anyone checking in. I just like to come up for air now and then and hear “yep, right direction.” It isn’t neediness. It’s cheap insurance against going very deep on the wrong thing.
For an employer, the cost is a five-minute check-in. Most people work better with one anyway.
To disclose or not
This was the conversation that stuck with me most.
One attendee said he didn’t get a single response to applications while his neurodivergence was on the first page of his CV. He moved it to the end, and the callbacks started. Same person, same experience, different page.
Others pointed out the irony. For most employers it’s a benefit. The ones who react badly tend to be the ones who don’t know much about it, or are nervous about what they don’t know.
My approach has been to feel out the employer first. When I interviewed at ICT, I had a hunch I wouldn’t be the only one on the spectrum there, so I said I was too. It went fine. I wouldn’t have said it everywhere.
I understand why people hold back. For a lot of people, the reference point for autism is Sheldon Cooper. We’re not all Sheldon. We’re not unfeeling either. It’s closer to the opposite: we feel everything, and a fair chunk of our energy goes into managing it.
What works for us works for everyone
This is the bit I’d want every hiring manager to read.
You don’t need to tiptoe around us. Most of what helps neurodivergent staff is just good communication. Be direct. Treat us like we’re German or Dutch. Ask the question you actually want answered.
If I’m doing mental gymnastics to work out what you mean, the message could be clearer. And if it’s hard for me to parse, I’m probably not the only one in the room guessing.
Writing down what “done” looks like isn’t a special accommodation. It’s what good teams already do.
The AI twist
The last topic got a laugh. A few people said they’ve been getting more compliments on their communication since AI tools turned up.
We use AI to translate: turning our instructions and messages into something neurotypical colleagues find easier to take in, with the softening and context they expect.
And it runs the other way too. To get anything useful out of an LLM, you have to say exactly what you mean. So neurotypical people are now getting daily practice at writing the way we’ve always wished they would. Prompting is accidental training in talking to autistic people.
Until next month
It was an excellent session, and I can’t wait for the next one.
If you’re a hiring manager on the fence, don’t be scared of it. Ask what someone needs, be direct, and hand out the occasional head pat. You’ll likely get more than you bargained for.