Autistic Devs

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A community for devs on the Autistic spectrum.

This is primarily a "safe space" from other communities on programming.dev that would rather tell us to "man up", than provide any reasonable social advice.

Posts that belong in this community include:

Venting
Seeking Advice
Personal Experiences / Stories

We are open to allistic/NT folx providing feedback! However, it MUST be done with the knowledge and understanding that we are autistic and require a lot more assistance in the domain of social understanding.

Posts/Comments that AREN'T allowed:

Posts that spread toxic masculinity - "man up", "be a man", etc.
Posts that attack allistic folx or those with different neurodivegence.
Posts that don't relate to an Autistic person's experience in software development, I.T., Infrastructure, or other tech focused roles.

If you are penning a response that includes a technical solution STOP!

Double check that the post asked for a technical solution - it likely doesn't. We recommend that technical questions go to their respective communities.

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Icebreaker Discussion - Dealing with ableism - What works and what doesn't? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's discuss able-ism in our industry.

For me, I mostly experience it whenever marketing has a "genius" idea that everyone should be little mini-marketers on social media. Essentially, they wanted us to make a lot more noise on social media and do cold outreach in our network. I was in no mood to exploit what little friends I have on social media. Not to mention the fact that I'm really no good at this stuff, and it's likely to backfire.

I put my foot down on that one - called the initiative ableist right in their "party" channel. And stated that if my participation was an issue, then I'd like to request non-participation as a reasonable accomodation for my autism.

Not sure that was good for my career though. Despite getting many DM's expressing thanks for standing up. I'm pretty sure higher ups will just think I'm "not a team player".

So did it work? Yes, but also there may be other consequences to my direct nature that I haven't seen yet.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fair, and I think I'd have gone that direction if it wasn't a slack channel where everyone was invited to, and then questioned if they decided to leave. It was also a very noisy channel where it was disrupting my work.

I didn't just throw this into some channel in which I wasn't invited or anything. I actually felt like I wasn't allowed to leave, which is why other NDs privately thanked me afterwards.

I can ignore the ignorable, but if you're going to hunt me down if I ignore it (like they were doing), then I needed to speak up in order for it to stop.

Typically I do just what you've described, just kinda ignore it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Fair-ish, but it's still just a public channel - even if you were invited into it.

Like you can right click a channel -> "Change Notifications" -> Nothing. Then @Channel or @Here or even @'th3raid0r' just stops working. And then mute the channel. Not more notifications from the channel. So that's not totally unignorable yet

You can leave a channel, but yea, that triggers a channel notification saying that you've left.

But yea, I don't know to which degree they were 'hunting you down'. At some point it's seems fine to put your foot down.

I put my foot down on that one - called the initiative ableist right in their “party” channel. And stated that if my participation was an issue, then I’d like to request non-participation as a reasonable accomodation for my autism.

I probably would have approached that a bit differently though - on one hand, less hostile, like of name calling them an "ableist" -
And on the other hand, even less compliant and requesting to not participate. I wouldn't really phrase it as a request. If you've been ignoring them so far, and they DM you, wait half an hour to respond and just somewhat politely decline and say "yea, I'm not gonna do that." - and then continue to ignore them some more. By requesting it and asking for accommodations you're already way too far into accepting it as your problem

As long as it's becoming loads of work for them to even get close to anything compliant, the more likely they'll just give up on it