> What would you want them to do if the tables were reversed?
While I understand this sentiment - is that really how you create a successful business?
If you have a worker who just doesn't perform at all, no matter what you do, should you fire them? Would you want to be fired if the tables were reversed?
The problem is that he was unfairly compensated by the economic system (capitalism) he works in, and had to fight for years only to just about break even on legal fees.
The guy's gumption led to the invention of a multi-billion dollar pear year industry, and he got basically none of it.
The inverse also happens, though, because socialism fails to capture the value. According to the labor theory of value, for example, his work would’ve been valued at some function of (training * hours worked). Despite creating billions in value for humanity, he would’ve been treated very similarly to the rest of his coworkers
But let's say it was a more socialist society. As a result, everyone would be earning more, including him. And maybe the CEO that tried to fuck his research would earn less.
IDK but for me that sounds like a very good trade-off, given the CEO did nothing, as always, and got billions.
> The guy's gumption led to the invention of a multi-billion dollar pear year industry, and he got basically none of it.
But... the billion dollar industry is also capitalism? This logic is circular and makes no sense. If there is no capitalism there is no compensation to be distributed in this case, period.
The argument that he was unfairly compensated based on merit is fundamentally a capitalist argument. You can't play it both ways.
Are you saying the outcome here is fair and desirable?
The first step to fixing a problem is admitting one exists. This seems clearly like a failure of capitalism to reward the innovation of a person who actually did the innovation.
The only reason the inventor didn't get properly compensated is because the system is designed to reward existing capital.
I can guarantee you the CEO that inherited the position due to family ties didn't earn $60k a year. Neither he worked for a year and a half without weekends.
Jeff Bezos had the idea of "what if we put a store online," and because he was the most successful at executing the idea of selling stuff using the computer, he deserves effectively infinity money? That seems like a super radical position, imo.
No one person has ever invented something good enough that they deserve an infinite amount of money. Maybe if somebody cures cancer some day.
AWS is the backbone of the internet, amazon warehouses are some of the most efficient in the world, lowering costs for everyone. People subscribe to prime in droves because of the value they get from it. Even if you zoom in to smaller assets, amazon has huge impact. Twitch brings a lot of people joy, same with kindle and even Alexa a few years ago.
"Selling stuff using the internet" probably makes you feel smart/superior but it infantilizes the company's contributions to the rest of us.
But Bezos didn't invent any of that stuff. As the other commenter said, he executed best on 'put a store on the internet' and made a bunch of money doing that. He then used that money to either acquire other businesses, like Twitch, or hire other people to invent more things, like AWS. That's the whole point of what OP's comment. Bezos took something completely reasonable for a single person to do, 'put a store on the internet' better than anyone else in the mid-90s, and used that as an entry point to reaping benefits from the ideas and the labor of hundreds of thousands of other people over decades.
Give me his parents initial investment and put me back in the days he started Amazon and I would.
Wait, I take it back. I wouldn't be able to exploit people as much as he did because I have a conscience. But I'd still be wealthy enough to live a comfortable life.
Stop glorifying luck as hard work. He was lucky. Wealthy parents and lived in a time where shopping online was not big yet.
Plenty of people willing to invest in you right now if you can manage to come up with an idea and are willing to work at it as Jeff Bezos did.
Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
You can glorify luck as much as you want, but hard work is the best way to maximise your "luck surface area". I've known plenty of people with countless wasted opportunities because they weren't willing to do the (hard) work.
Even inside the US, that's a very small niche that's present mostly in a few places like in SV, Seattle and NY (I'm sure there are a few more, but you get my point).
The startup world is more about connections than hard work or competence. How many ridiculous startups get money because they have connections with VCs? How many very good ideas never get funding because they aren't in that circle? How many startup founders are 2, 3, 4 startups in and keep failing up? And those who can't bring those ideas to life because they work 2 jobs to sustain their families?
There's more than an order of magnitude of hard working people that will never even get a chance of becoming billionaires compared to the lucky few that were in the right place, at the right time, with access to resources and sometimes were even hard workers (this one is not required, despite the myth).
Meanwhile I've met many incompetent people that hardly work and are still successful business owners and millionaires because... they were already rich.
It's how the world works today. Maybe it'll always be like this, but I like to think we can change it.
> Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
Yes, it is if you're the only shop in town. If you can't leave the poverty treadmill because you can barely afford rent after working these ridiculously low salaries. I could go on.
I find it appalling how so many assume that people working in the Amazon warehouses are full of opportunities everywhere and they choose to work there, so they can't complain. I know we're mostly software engineers that are well paid but we could make an effort and put ourselves in their shoes for a second, couldn't we?
No, it's not black and white like your comment is claiming it is, and it never will be.
There's a big difference between choosing to pay the lowest amount possible without having people literally starve to death and a decent living wage. There's still a ton of exploitation that turns into profit for the few at the top, but they could at the very least treat people like... people.
If Bezos (or any other billionaire) chose to reduce their profits a few percent points, they'd already be able to provide a much better life for all of their employees. In my book, even putting the profit debate aside (exploitation of labor), that's exploitation in the moral sense too.
I live in a small town in Eastern Europe and I get contacted weekly by individual investors, firms and funds. In my turn, I mentor entrepreneurs and invest (angel, seed or later rounds) in ideas that could make a difference locally.
Throw away your scarcity mindset. It's outdated.
> the only shop in town
Feel free to open your own "shop in town" to offer employees another choice. Till then, 1 is much, much better than 0.
Plenty of shops in my town that sell stuff I can find cheaper on Amazon. Also plenty of employers too (which is the kind of "shop" I was talking about) that compete with Amazon on the employment market.
Pretending that people would be better with less employers in town and laughing at the suggestion that anybody can come in and steal away employees from Amazon if they are unhappy there - is the naive take.
You do realize you're on hackernews, a platform built by YCombinator right? You can apply with your startup just like anyone else and, if you're good enough, they'll invest half a million dollars.
Yeah, you're right, he was massively lucky too.
But even with that, does he deserve this much wealth for this?
Would he deserve this much money if executing that idea was incredibly hard?
Does someone deserve to make a small fortune every year pushing keys without breaking a sweat, while someone that scrubs his toilet is living check-to-check?
While some businesses are able to create regulatory moats that prevents (by military force, if necessary) consumers from spending their money elsewhere, I'm not sure what stops consumers from spending their money elsewhere when it comes to Amazon? I see nothing that it offers which is meaningfully unique. Anything I have ever considered buying from Amazon is also available at the 'mom & pop' store down the street.
If consumers actively choose to trade an IOU that offers future goods or services (that's what money is) to Bezos for something Bezos is offering now, and not to you for whatever it is you are offering now, I guess he "deserves" it, no? Surely people should have autonomy in who they decide to make trades with?
Bezos is not the one you’re buying from, he just forced himself in between you and the seller. He offers nothing but a platform. Whoever you choose to trade with on Amazon, he’s there to take some off the top.
Actually, access to use the platform is what you are buying. In fact, Bezos gives the products you are interested in to you for free as an incentive to buy into using his platform. He then, of course, is able to use the proceeds from you buying into using the platform to pay for the product he gave away to you for free, and keeps some for himself to justify operation of the platform.
If that particular platform doesn't interest you, why pay for it? As before, the store down the street probably sells the same thing. There is nothing I know of that Amazon sells that you can't also get somewhere else.
Those people who bought his products, invested in his company or otherwise increased his wealth, thought that he deserves the money, as they got something valuable in exchange. I don't think the opinion of an unrelated party matters that much.
If you took all of Bezos' wealth, and evenly distributed it to everyone in America, it would be about $600 per person. If instead you tried to spend it on eliminating the federal deficit, it would knock out about 5% of it.
I would rather Bezos is allowed to try and invest it in something as impactful as Amazon again. He's certainly fair likelier to do it than, say, the US government, or you yourself.
I would like to see a source for the argument, that because Bezos did something highly impactful once, he is likely to do it again. His personal track record seems to be unimpressive, if you look at his other ventures. Blue Origin is the most well known, but plays a distant second fiddle to SpaceX and arguably others, none of the other companies he is personally involved in have had breakthrough success.
The same is true for other tech billionaires. They mostly have one or a couple of successes that can in any way attributed to them: Gates has Microsoft and his foundation, Musk has Tesla and SpaceX, Twitter is a clusterf*ck, Jobs has Apple, etc. etc.
My impression is that at best, even very giftet people have the opportunity to do a couple of "great things" in their lifetime and most stop after the first. The societal benefit of giving them dominion over unimaginable wealth in the hope that they'll are much more likely to come up with the next game changer is negligible. Historically, the next big innovation has mostly come from someone not yet incredibly rich (but empowered by access to capital, beneficial systems and knowledge, all often provided by the government).
This point also highlights the amount of luck that is involved in striking it super-rich. It's not that Bezos was necessarily the "best"; if that were true, the success would be more repeatable (especially given all of the advantages of incumbency/access/wealth/etc). We have decided as a society that we want there to be a small number of lottery winners, rather than a more balanced outcome for everybody.
Running his first success through now (which his "wealth" pretty much entails) is plenty for us. The "everything store". His second? AWS. Third? Prime. Fourth? One-day-delivery. Bravo!
Wow, I underestimated what Bezos' wealth could pay off in our national debt by an order of magnitude! It could only pay 1/10 of what I thought - only 0.45%! Incredible how much debt the US government has.
In terms of your own situation, assuming you are not disabled and are a healthy adult, then you need to start thinking longterm. Not "how can I become wealthier today", but "how can I become wealthier over 30 years?" The choices you make every day compound. You should work on a positive outlook, getting real skills, and trying to improve your situation every day.
> i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.
Bezos's parents when he was born were a highschool student and a circus performer. From him to be where he is today, probably indicates there are other differences.
How so? If I claim that the only difference between myself and my twin is that they had a 4.0 and I didn't, I'm totally missing the point that the difference is what we did--not where we started.
Plenty of people willing to give you right now that money if you are willing to try do what Bezos did. This very website was made by some of them, you may have heard of that.
And the fac that his parent had that money to invest in him? Another success of Capitalism.
That's awesome to hear! OK, I'm planning to start an online bookstore, and maybe we'll do some M&A down the line and expand to offering cloud services and other subscriptions. Send me a message if you're willing to give me $300,000!
First, I would suggest you select an idea which is not a verbatim copy of a tech giant of today. Do the due diligence and ask yourself: what is your unique value proposition? What are you gonna compete on? How are you gonna differentiate? How are you gonna reach your prospective customers?
Then how are you gonna use the money I give you in your business to grow it 10x in an about 5-10 years time frame so I can get my investment back? Put together a plan. Call it a "business plan" and put it in writing.
Jeff Bezos had to answer these kinds of questions (and many, harder ones) before he got his first investment. What seems to you as an obvious, trivial idea today was a novel, risky approach 30 years ago.
He did the work and that is why he's rich. We are here commenting on an investor's forum instead and that is why we are... what we are.
Imagine a bunch of guys start looking for oil. One guy is first to find a massive oil field because he started looking first, he's luckier, smarter and harder-working than others. If this guy wasn't born, the society wouldn't be worse off by much, the oil would still be found, but maybe few months later.
That's the type of Jeff Bezos' wealth, it's mostly "discovered" rather than earned.
That's true. You just need to exploit your fellow humans! Make them work for you but never pay them for the full value they bring. Always pay them the least they will still accept. So you get a piece of their pie. Your position of power will allow you to do so, and people will see your position of power as "natural" and will see no problem in the exploitation.
And people who buy up companies, take them apart piece by piece, slash all spending, lay people off, sell the parts piece by piece, and pocket all the money? Are they providing value?
This is true: the services companies like Amazon provide are worth more than 60,000 lifetimes of money could provide without them.
The question is: how many other people, with the wealth Jeff Bezos had when he was younger, would be able to create something like Amazon? The reason he did and not someone else, how much of that was a combination of opportunity and luck?
Capitalism is a fine system, but extremes like this are a problem. And the fact that once companies get big enough, they can start to become inefficient and worse (in price + quality), because they get benefits like lobbying and owning the entire production process which potential competitors don’t.
Amazon was built on top of layers and layers of public goods that provide surplus value that Bezos and others are able to package into a product: postal services, roads, internet infrastructure, open source software, etc.
Indeed, there should be many people on this forum that understand that providing value is a relatively small part of the problem (see: any of a host of heavily used open source projects), it’s the “spend money on” part of the execution that matters.
The whole question then becomes, who actually created the value that is being paid for in this scenario?
Certainly, Bezos created a company that did many innovative things and made the correct decisions for him to win out over his competition. However, the concept of an online store wasn’t really all that novel. Such a store would have been impossible to create in the 1970s, but suddenly it became so in the 90s and there were plenty of potential competitors popping up at the same time because external conditions made it possible. Additionally, because the entire concept was new, he didn’t have to compete with an existing behemoth like Amazon is today (though of course the incumbent physical retail giants of the time shouldn’t be downplayed, nonetheless, starting an online everything store today is a very different proposition).
The issue isn’t “did Bezos create something novel and valuable”, but rather “how much value did he create, and how much did he just benefit from an existing pool of value waiting to be tapped, that was created by the rest of society”? To that end, it’s not a question of whether Bezos might “deserve” to be wealthy, but rather, how wealthy?
The consistent framing, as illustrated by your comment, is that our capitalist system inherently gives just dues to those that create value, and is often accompanied by the line that taxing the rich is “punishing success”. But the countervailing point is that it is often the case that the very rich receive outsized gains as the benefit from common resources, and they ought to pay back into that public trust in due course as they have benefitted from it the most.
Have you ever played Monopoly until the point where someone has well over the majority of the money? It really isn't fun for the rest of the players. Pretty much everyone either gangs up on that person to redistribute the wealth to keep the game going -- or they win by making it so literally no one else can have anything.
The same thing happens here, except it isn't a game.
That may be true, but I don't think it's a very useful way of framing it.
The relationship between wealth and quality of life isn't linear (beyond a certain point, additional wealth won't meaningfully improve your health, comfort, etc). But that's very much not the case for power. AFAICT, the relationship between wealth and power is linear as far as the eye can see. More wealth == more power.
It seems pretty clear that wealth is not the most sensible way to distribute power. Otherwise, why bother with things like democracy? We could have just stuck with something like feudalism, right?
Old guy me expects a revolution of some kind because the standard of living in N. America is slowly declining for most and they remember when it was better.
You can agree or dis-agree but Americans won't let that happen forever...
As you scroll through the chart it blocks out other things that the money could be used for. Treating cancer. Housing veterans. Feeding schoolchildren. Etc... Showing them as the tiny blocks they are against his incomprehensible wealth.
Most of his wealth being Amazon stocks makes this companies treatments of employees WORSE not better.
The fact that one person can steal so much wages from his employees while simultaneously also getting “paid” through their equity, and that stealing wages and wage growth from his employees is viewed as positive is everything that’s wrong with capitalism.
What does "hoarding" mean here?
Amazon's value is reflected in its share price, this isn't decided by one person or entity. When someone or some entity buys or sells Amazon stock they are deciding what they think the stock is worth. He owns a large amount of this stock because he founded the company.
Is he hoarding Amazon stock? Do you mean there is a finite amount of wealth and he has hoarded it somehow in Amazon !?
He worked to make his company as valuable as possible, which is what his job was.
I was expecting a lot when they announced video-conferencing, given that the app itself is well-designed and performs generally great. But when I finally got to try it it crashed the app, and never really worked ever since.
Such a shame, I'd love to have a single app for messaging and audio/video chats.
I wish that the slack company would focus on performance and e.g. making video calls work on Firefox.
As alternative recommendation, matrix.org is somewhere between IRC and slack/telegram. It's an open protocol like IRC, so you can pick your preferred client (and server) and aren't trapped on some platform. Open source also means that it's not as UX streamlined as proprietary stuff, mind that.
It does have a lot of modern features like attachments, reactions, replies, etc., which I found to be almost unusable on older systems like jabber.
> They don't need to fire anyone. They just want to.
Why would they want to?
If they make so much money, why fire a few people for a massive amount of bad PR?
So seem to know the reasoning. Enlighten us please.
Everyone's doing it, we might be in a recession, now is the best time. Their announcement both follows a trend and gets lost in the noise, it doesn't stand out as possibly bad management.
Plus someone was saying that it reduces inflationary pressures for employees. I.e. you put a lot of people out on the job market and you scare others inside the company, who are now suddenly happy to still have a job, ergo they stop asking as much for raises or for high salaries when they apply.
> Why would they want to?
Then enlighten me how a <<hugely>> profitable business needs to <<layoff>> large percentages of its workforce???
Its not bad PR when the narrative has already been set. This is a very opportunistic move at cost reduction that would have been scrutinized heavily under regular circumstances.
Because Google employees are really really expensive, and this won't generate a massive amount of bad PR because everyone is doing it. It's the ideal time to sack of employees you don't want.
Or: Apple is profiting from both repairs and sale of repair kits?
(I have no idea which is true, but the fact that the kit is roughly the price of the repair+a reasonable salary for the work is by no means an indication that they make no profit)
It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.
I'm not saying it is fair. Life is never fair. The only one who has the ability to influence those situations is oneself. You can't rely on other to change - it won't work anyways. You have to be the one that improves those interactions. For your own good.
> It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.
Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?
Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.
I think in the end people who are different (no matter if autistic, bipolar, whatever) need to learn to get along with each other. Whenever one side says: "I am right, I don't move a bit to accomodate anyone else", he is doing the opposite. This piece reads exactly like that. It calls people who communicate and think differently indistinctly bullies.
If you claim to be a complex thinker, you also consider people in your analysis, then that should also apply first hand, not just as a part of the solutions you propose. If you are unable to do that: fine, nobody is expected to be perfect. But don't claim to be perfect.
Neuro diverse people can't necessarily change their behaviour because it's how their brain is wired. It's like asking a visually impaired person to just see better. Many neuro diverse people have to force themselves to "fit in" causing untold stress and trauma. That's not for their own good, it's forcing their brains to work in a way that they don't.
That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.
Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone. This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over the years, which also caused untold stress for the entire team.
To give an example from this post, "is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" While certainly a valid question – and I wasn't there and I don't know if it was phrased like that exactly – but I'm sure those questions could have been asked in a way that came off as less challenging and dismissive, resulting in a more constructive conversation. You really can learn these things.
Or, maybe the manager was just an asshole/idiot and the unconstructive interaction is all completely unrelated to the author's autism. Could be too.
The first point – "the non-autistic person is not hearing what I'm saying" – sounds like the author might benefit from trying to understand why that is, and adjusting the way they say things. Sometimes small changes can make large differences, and it really doesn't need to cause untold stress. Effective communication is hard and also something everyone has to learn.
> That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.
Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.
This is clearly not true. I was diagnosed with autism in high school, struggled with many things for many years, and nearing 40 now I've learned a great many things since then. My previous comment you're replying to was very much written from personal experience. I didn't mention this because I didn't think it's necessarily all that relevant.
Of course not everyone is the same, and things are different for other people; everyone is different. Some people may struggle more, or may have a hard time learning some things. But a blanket "you can never learn anything, full stop" is just not true.
Seeing how many people object to this first question that I think is just... perfectly fine (I talked a lot about it to my wife) unlocked something. I wasn't aware that a question like "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" can be construed as dismissive while another question like "what are you looking to achieve?" wouldn't.
In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."
I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.
Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.
For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:
- say hi
- ask where they come from and what they do
- say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X"
- listen and ask follow-up questions
- try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds
- mimic their posture
- when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do
- then continue asking questions about them and listen
- go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves.
- don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever
- don't forget to mimic their posture
- and eye contact!
- don't rock on your chair!
- rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.
That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.
No, that's not what I'm essentially saying. Of course autistic can learn - it's called "masking". Masking causes trauma. Not just "finding co-worker annoying" but "not being able to go outside, not sleeping for 4 days in a row, stimming to the edge of self-harm, etc". Trauma. Not just being "stressed".
Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement. It's not a choice. It's an invisible difference, one that society finds it hard to understand. I avoid "disability" because that suggests that neurotypical society is the only right way and anyone else that doesn't fit into it is just wrong somehow. They can't help it any more than a blind person can.
The way their brains are wired aren't their fault and yes, the rest of society is going to have to change. Autistic people exist, so it's up to the rest of us to learn how to deal with it.
Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend. It's coming, get ahead of the curve and maybe you can be part of the team's stress relief.
> Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement.
It absolutely is, it's a particular view and outlook on things. Blind or Deaf people have different takes and "movements" too. Deaf people in particular where some consider deafness to be core part of their identity and and a culture, rather than a disability to be "fixed", whereas others do merely see it as a disability they would like to see "fixed". Cochlear implants are something of a controversial issue among deaf people for example.
> Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend.
It's hard to explain, but as a first response it implies "the current code is fine", or "we don't need to do this". That is, you risk it being perceived as a challenge to the idea ("rewrite it in React"), rather than a question to explore the goals.
Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a perfectly valid engineering question for rewriting or refactoring anything, but not everyone has this kind of engineering mindset.
I would phrase it more open-ended, such as "Okay! What goals would you like to achieve?"
Making these kinds of judgments is exactly why autism is a disability.
I understand from the comments and my life experience that there is something there, I learned to smile, be engaging, mirror body posture, ask questions instead of going into statements too quickly, but what are you describing just makes no sense to me. How is "what goals would you like to achieve?" not dismissive, but "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" is?
One is a pretty vague question about something they already stated (they want to ask me my opinion about rewriting the checkout in react because company X improved their checkout), the other one is something I need input on to be able to do that. It's literally the most efficient question I can think of so that I can avoid wasting their time.
I described in another comment how it never "really" occurred to me that a question could be perceived as dismissive. If I wanted to dismissive I would... just say so?
The thing is, saying it is dismissive, getting upset, and shutting me down helps exactly no one here. What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on. Trust me that I don't let this kind of advice go to waste.
Sure, I get all of that. As I touched on in my other comment[1] I had to learn this, too. I think me-from-ten-years-ago would have posted a very similar comment as yours.
Even if it's completely learned scripted behaviour that you don't really understand, that's still a win for everyone involved. But I think that with time and effort a sizeable part (not everyone) of autistic/neurodivergent folk can understand these things at least to some degree too. At least, I was able to and I know some other folks who were too.
> What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on.
Yes, I fully agree; I try hard to look past people's failings in general and not to get upset too quickly at things that don't really matter. But ... people have emotional responses that aren't really rational, and not everyone has that kind of attitude.
And the end of the day – and this really applies to a lot of things – I can't really control other people's behaviour, feelings, or attitudes. The only thing I am in control of is me. So I focus on that, rather than saying "other people need to adjust", because you will have very limited success with that at best.
(This of course doesn't mean we should accept wildly inappropriate or harmful behaviour like, say, racism or other forms of blatant discrimination, just that vague "emotional feelings" like a response to a well-intentioned question are not likely to get "fixed" any time soon across all of society, as these kind of emotions are part of "the human condition").
I'm not 100% sure if you are asking for further explanation of why it would seem dismissive, but I'll try to break it down a bit from an NT perspective, in case that is illuminating.
The query "Do you think..." can sometimes backfire if the other party is feeling defensive or vulnerable. It can imply that you've already decided to frame the conversation as exploring their problematic beliefs rather than objective facts.
The negative phrasing "not performing well" unfortunately echoes another idiom where the non-negated statement is assumed to be true and the negated question bears a tone of incredulity. These questions all probe the same fact but carry different emotional baggage: "Should we try to improve the performance of X?" "Does X perform well?" "Does X have performance problems?" "Is X not performing well?" Slight differences in vocal tone or emphasis can dramatically increase these differences too.
Then, by jumping to specifics (about performance), it can also imply that you are assuming that this is the only reasonable motivation for the work in question, rejecting other avenues. A safe way to avoid this type of interpretation would be to start off more broadly and neutrally to establish common ground before diving into such details. That's why "What are the goals?" types of question are seen as positive and cooperative. That you would like to engage in dialog and explore ideas together.
You put all those elements together in one question, and I can easily see how the other party would feel that they are being blocked. It's almost like some martial arts move where a precise combination of movement and posture is turning the conversational momentum against itself.
I'd also like to point out an ironic twist in your closing lament that "getting upset and shutting me down helps exactly no one here". Unfortunately, such implied tone and emotional content is decoded subconsciously and immediately. The emotion hits concurrently or even before the denoted factual information is fully understood. It can be just as difficult for an NT person to _not_ perceive some of these signals as it is for you to recognize they are being sent. Frustratingly, the same experience between two NTs, if chronic, might be seen as abusive or where the idea of "gaslighting" would come up to describe the perverse torture where the one feeling hurt is told they are mistaken in their feelings.
The thing about the autistic masking causing trauma thing is that I haven’t really seen high quality evidence for the theory. It just sounds intuitively correct.
You're reading more into this piece than is there. The author never advocates that the rest of the world should change. This post only claims that these miscommunication scenarios between experts on the autistic spectrum and allistic people HAPPEN.
They happen to me too.
Understanding the nature of the miscommunication is the first step towards averting it in the future.
And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either.
I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss.
There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if they'd have been so critical, if author hadn't self-identified as autistic. I wonder if some of these commenters have a bad attitude to self-identified autistics.
I've never known an autistic person well; but I worked closely in an office with an autistic developer. I found his code over-complex and hard to follow. Pair-coding with this guy was a waste of time; he couldn't explain what he was doing. Author, however, seems to be able to explain himself fine.
what is the point of dismissing someones Autism purely based on a single blog post and one person you knew? Are you actually trying to convey something helpful here?
I'm not dismissing anyone's anything. I believe autism exists.
> one person you knew?
I've only known one person who was diagnosed autistic. It's a rare condition; I've known a dozen people with bipolar, and half-a-dozen diagnosed schizophrenics (either I'm attracted to psychotics, or they're attracted to me!)
My point was simply that author's account could be anyone's account, apart from the author's self-identification as autistic. Without that, this entire thread would just be about how to deal with a crap boss.
>>I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism
You very much are dismissing someone's something.
Worse, I don't think the author explicitly stated they were autistic in the piece...So, you're assuming someone's something just so you can dismiss it?
This doesn't read to me as dismissing the author's autism. It reads to me as observing that a non-autist could have written substantially the same article (minus making it about autism), and they then went off to observe that this comment section would likely have looked very different in that case.
It's an interesting thought experiment, and at least to me it feels like you're the one who is reading dismissal into it for no good reason.
It's not a secret that autistic people have trouble communicating in the workplace. This is not a post about my life's story and me self-diagnosing as autistic. This is me relating my experience explicitly in response to someone saying something about autistic people.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted in the autistic community for a number of reasons, I am also in the process of pursuing a more "traditional" diagnosis.
It's great that you think this post applies to everybody, it however is very much in response to someone stigmatizing autistic people.
I find the term "spectrum" problematic. Is Asperger's part of the spectrum? Wikipedia says it's an invalid diagnosis. So did all those people with Asperger's just get dumped in the "Autistic Spectrum" bucket?
DSoes the spectrum run from ultra-violet to infra-red? Is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot? Does that mean we're all "on the spectrum"?
If that's what it means, then that seems like dismissing Autism as just being one extreme of being an awkward person.
I think a lot of devs wind up working with people who are awkward. They don't like it (who would?) Some of those awkward people self-identify as autistic. So the devs decide they don't care much for autistic people. I think that's a kind of bigotry; they should really dislike working with awkward people, whatever the reason for their awkwardness.
[Awkward: apparently this is related to upward, downward, northward, etc. "Awk-" signifies "at an unusual angle". I know of no other word that starts with "awk-"]
> Is Asperger's part of the spectrum? Wikipedia says it's an invalid diagnosis. So did all those people with Asperger's just get dumped in the "Autistic Spectrum" bucket?
This is explicitly what happened. The DSM-V explicitly automatically gives you an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if you had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I think it’s hilariously how blatantly political this criteria is.
As for the legitimacy of spectrum disorders, the only thing I have to say about the subject is the parable of Chesterson’s fence. Think about the problems people were trying to solve with the concept of autism spectrum disorder.
>is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot
You aren’t far off but are missing th forest for the trees. It’s part of a diagnostic system where every disorder is meant to be discrete and non-overlapping and you either have it or you don’t and other good traits you would want in a diagnostic nosology. The spectrum is an artifact of it having to bend to describe what are actually several distinct similarly presenting conditions. It doesn’t have to describe EVERYTHING, it has to fit a hole in the nosology. Asperger’s was depreciated in large part because of the overlap with autism.
If you want something to criticize take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole. A lot of the assumptions underpinning autism underpin more of mental health.
> take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole.
Indeed.
Consider, for example, the diagnostic criteria for bipolar. There seems to be half-a-dozen conditions wrapped up in that term, not all of which have poles. Not all people with bipolar are psychotic (that is really important; if you're dealing with someone with bipolar, it makes a huge difference if they are subject to delusions or paranoia).
I believe (might be wrong) that "schizophrenia" is now a discredited diagnosis. Even depression is a fuzzy target. How do you distinguish ordinary sadness from depressive illness? Anti-depressant pills seem to work on both. And there's no "chemical imbalance" theory of depression that hasn't been discredited.
My sense is that we haven't progressed much in understanding mental illness since Victorian times, with their diagnoses of "melancholy".
> expect the whole world to change their behaviour
Who is saying this? The article provides a perspective that is not discussed very often as a way of helping people understand these situations from a vantage point they might not have considered. Nobody is demanding anything.
I'm creating a startup to do just that. There's both huge upside[$$$], but also some legal risk. If this appeals to you and you're an innovator in the social engineering space lmk.
Are there rules/standards for how these top secret keys are stored? HDCP, Mediavine, keys to the Internet, etc. Sure, you could keep it locked in a Scrooge McDuck security vault, but you need to be able to burn the key into hardware/software, meaning it ultimately needs to be distributed across many machines, greatly increasing the number of people with potential access.
There's both. The encryption (decryption) key has leaked. The original question was about "making your own microcode", for which you would need the (not leaked, and unlikely to leak) private signing key.
Those codes were intentionally zeroed to get around what was (most likely rightly so) considered to be a failure of the launch doctrine to take into account the possibility of the leadership being knocked out which would make a retaliatory launch impossible due to the lack of valid launch codes.
I don't think Intel has such problems and I assume they are keen on keeping their microcode update process from being abused - it is not as if they don't have enough problems as it is.
