How to Thrive With Your Autist (Engineer) Colleagues - Bowtied Fullstack
87: Bring the best out of your team.
Another BowTied guest post. Both
and did their thing. Getting into details and explaining how to open a bank account in a remote location as well as how to keep track while sending cold emails to your prospects. Do yourself a favor. Read both. Today’s guest?. Bringing you a solid overview of how to thrive with your engineering colleagues. Which helps if you are depending on them. Or if you are spending multiple hours per day with them the same logic applies. Not to mention that at this point we all can agree social skills will become more relevant in upcoming years - another plus. Why you might ask?Social skills and emotional intelligence are going down each year. Short form and all the noise around are not helping. Realize the potential in this. We also suggest reading the next 3 years - run to make you think about where things are heading… Time for our free Fullstack to do his part.
First off, thank you to BeautyOfSaaS for the opportunity.
Greetings from the engineering org!
Time to share some insights into the strangest creatures you'll find outside of a zoo. Humans, yes they look like, yet without the social bonding or talent for natural social interactions that most emerge with as adult humans.
Their interests seem lacking, with no understanding of sports, music, movies; but occasional obsessive encyclopedic knowledge. They either have nothing or everything to say. So how do you best manage, interact, and deal with the autist engineers in your company or your life? Let’s get down to the basics.
I'mBowTied Fullstack, a staff software engineer at a FAANG company you would recognize. I have my fair share of working with engineers all across the spectrum, and seeing how some managers can bring the best out of them, and others can't.
This post will help you join the ranks of the former, and help your team succeed, regardless of the concentration and composition of autism you have to work with.
Be Explicit, Speak the Unspoken
Civilized life is one of the unspoken.
Taboos, cultural expectations, behavior that keeps you welcome in polite society.
It will vary from country to country, even company to company, or team to team.
Some people naturally quickly find out what behavior is expected of them.
But many engineers, and people generally, in increasingly diverse teams lack the intuition or adaptability of their own behavior to let them blend in.
Maybe they have off-color jokes.
Maybe they post publicly in Slack channels information that you told them in implied confidence.
Maybe they drone endlessly in meetings, bike shedding about meaningless details, nerd sniped in the minutes, not noticing the rest of the room tuning out.
Many symptoms reduce down to an inability to "read the room".
If there are people who can't sense how they should act in different situations, how can you help them?
You are neither their parent nor their spouse, so having a serious conversation about how they fundamentally are socially incompetent as a person and have a personality marred with horrendous flaws is not a conversation for you to have.
Rather, use tactics to reduce the risk of them pulling the team off track.
In meetings, gently guide the conversation to the next topic and put further discussion to Slack or a later meeting. “Let’s take this offline.” Before meetings with external stakeholders, schedule a 10 minute pre-game coach huddle where you review what the purpose of the meeting is, what role and behavior you expect of them, and what success or failure looks like with examples.
When you tell them something privately, assume that it will leak out if you don't tell them that you are sharing it in confidence and they shouldn't share it with anyone else.
What may feel belittling or condescending to have to spell out explicitly is a lifeline to many on your team. Explicit conversations are guard rails that not only protect the outcomes you are trying to achieve, but also protect them from shooting themselves in the foot, and the corresponding guilt, shame, and frustration that will consequently follow.
Speak the unspoken. Save everyone a world of hurt.
Be the Weatherman, Warn of Upcoming Storms or Sunny Days
Regardless of company size, there are always changes underway that are above the engineering pay grade.
The startup may be in talks for getting acquired.
The division in a larger company may have upcoming rounds of layoffs on the horizon.
A new vice president may mean a fresh slate to make good impressions and prepare for your next promotion.
These types of scenarios happen in any human organization, and especially in fast moving industries like tech or finance. Yet, many engineers and others can be so heads down on their assigned Jira tickets that they miss the forest for the trees.
They remain busy picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. They have no idea about the mass about to plow into them. While there's rarely any legitimate need for doomer-ist pessimism, giving gentle nudges to team members about the current zeitgeist and upcoming inflection points or opportunities can be the extra guidance they need to remain in the right mindset for the current season.
If the team needs to be in a game-time heads-down grinding mindset, tell them. If now's a time to let off the gas and explore side quests and tech debt cleanup, don't wait for them to clue in.
Tell them when it's sunny and a good day to play outside. Tell them when a storm is approaching, time to batten down the hatches.
When management changes direction on a key issue or mandate, their messages in the following months will sound hypocritical and illogical to the engineering mind if they didn't realize that direction changed a few months ago in the latest strategic planning doc they ignored. Alerting your team to the change will reduce the contrast of hypocrisy and reduce churn as they bail to another team or company to resolve their new feelings of distrust.
To remain informed yourself, means browsing other team Slack channels, keeping a loose grasp of what else is going on in the company, reading investor disclosures, quarterly earnings, and annual strategic planning docs. Tune into AMAs with management and annual presentations.
95% of it will be a bore, but 5% of the time the mask will slip and they may stumble out some honest words about where they are taking the organization or company. That 5% is pure alpha which you'll notice your team will miss as they complain about how boring the session was. You don't need to be hyper-dialed in taking notes for the full presentation, but remain lucid as you do other busywork. Make sure you pay enough attention to catch when they go off-script.
Whether as a colleague or manager, giving little reminders will endow enormous trust from others as they see over time how you saved them from careening over a cliff with behavior that was not fit for the current climate.
Succeed Together, Lift All Boats
Many engineers, and people generally, fall into the trap of thinking that if they do their job well, they will be rewarded. For many, this is often a revealing of the subconscious desire to hear "Good job, son" from their father. Regardless of age, you will now be unable to unsee how the desire for validation compels most people's behavior long past childhood.
Lucky for you, you probably are well aware by now that good work is not enough. Your manager is not your dad. You both need good work, and the tactful skill to assemble it into a promo packet which will get stamped by the committee and signed off on by the CEO.
While you should prioritize applying this advice in your own career management, sprinkling guidance or offering practical coaching to colleagues will have many mutual benefits.
First, fundamentally you are working with other humans. They will intuitively be tribal in their eventual assembling of a natural hierarchy and bids for attention, money, and power. You will advance faster in your career if you have an increasing number of colleagues who have your back, who like you, who owe their success to you, who are willing to sign off on whatever HR paperwork is required to approve your next promotion or avoid the layoff line.
Become well-respected and well-liked by giving good advice.
Second, as you build your tribe of people who like, respect, and are willing to align themselves in the direction that you set, remember that you have more power at your disposal if they succeed and move up the ranks as well.
If you reflect on how any secret society like the Freemasons or Skull & Bones has amassed so much "supposed" power and influence, it is that their group members do not act out of individual ambition. They rise, and bring others with them, and with more in higher and higher ranks, they can coordinate and achieve phenomenal feats. Supposedly.
The same applies at a small scale within whatever team or company you are in. If you can over time amass people throughout the organization who like and respect you, and are at higher ranks and positions themselves, you continue to cement yourself as both an effective and indispensable figure within the hierarchy. In times of promotions or seasons of layoffs, you will have been glad that you put in the extra effort to amass this capital.
And lastly, outside of the politics of the team and company you are in, people will remember you if you make a positive impact on them and help them succeed.
When they move onto a new job, they may refer you in and it could be a killer opportunity.
When you start your own company, they may gladly jump ship to help build your dream.
When you're trying to hire, they may refer someone to you that could be the person you were looking for.
Helping others succeed is a fundamental skill that applies within your current team and company, even if you leave for a new one. Even beyond the professional realm, becoming an effective coach to help others succeed, autistic engineers or otherwise, is a pivotal skill for parenting and navigating personal relationships.
Help others succeed, and you will lift all boats, including your own.
That’s a Wrap
More than asking them to put the Rubik's cube down during sprint planning, successfully managing and working with the autist engineer type takes a variety of skills and approaches, some of which we covered above.
I have put these into practice to help many succeed in my W2 day job and with new friends I've met online as an anon. They have ended up making collectively $ millions of dollars as a result of promotions, and new job offers, and avoided layoffs by following my advice and applying my tactics.
If you're looking for more like this, I write long-form on Substack and in short hot takes on social media. As always, my DMs are open.
Fullstack out.
What else is there to add? Building long-term relationships and navigating your engineer friends will benefit you long term. This is important for those operating in the tech sector. If you are looking for more guides on how to navigate through the tech jungle - make sure to give him a sub.
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Being on the field for a couple of years you nailed it 100 %. A job is more then Jira Tickets