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she had no choice but to adapt to their rules. The only accommodation she asked for was the right to work from home on days when she didn’t sleep well the night before and she was still told no. I don’t personally know very much about the law at all, but that sounds like a lawsuit any lawyer would at least consider taking.Let’s say for the sake of argument that this same software company completely ignores the comments from their customers that their software is hard to use and extremely unintuitive. Their whole business model is based on continuing to use manufacturing-related software programs that look a lot like the ones used in the 90s and have barely been updated. They don’t know they’re on the brink of bankruptcy if they don’t realize they can’t get away with abusing their employees and customers alike because they keep ignoring that some people’s brains just work differently and that’s okay because the law says it is.This software company really needs to convert some job titles into fairly paid UX researchers PDQ, especially because they rely so heavily on their grossly underpaid frontline agents. Those same employees can’t even afford the good healthcare they offer to every company employee; the only ones who can afford it are the ones the company considers “important enough.”Thinking there are “important” and “unimportant” classes of employees sounds a lot like discrimination, too, but it’s hard to prove if your brain doesn’t understand why some people would want to discriminate against others in the first place. That trait sounds an awful lot like an autistic one.Imagine that the same software company tells their employees to think more like detectives investigating a case while they’re doing their work. That sounds an awful lot like the very definition of a <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/743411/what-is-ux-and-what-does-it-stand-for/">UX role</a> without anywhere close to the compensation. They even call their entry-level employees customer experience agents. They’re so clearly offering such an obvious clue in the very job title and getting away with it. Meanwhile, they’re paying them and treating them as though they’re ordinary customer service reps.They’re paying entry-level user experience researchers <a href="https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=UX_Researcher/Salary">almost half</a> what they should be. And they’re getting away with it by a slight title change from the more accurately descriptive “researcher” to a much worse “agent.” They also think they can trick their employees into never catching on by spelling out the word experience instead of the more correctly used “X” because they really believe their employees are too dumb to figure it out. Most of them actually never catch on to it because they’ve been discriminated against for their whole lives.It almost looks like they’re even promoting their brightest employees based on when they seem like they’re on the verge of realizing what their actual work is before they walk away. That ALSO sounds like clear discrimination but being unable to understand why people would want to discriminate against others sounds like a pretty autistic trait. They require being on the job for 6 months to allow employees the “privilege” of working from home full-time, even though the company regularly tells all employees

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that they sometimes have to work from home when it suits their business purposes because it’s so easily done.The “6-month” requirement is based solely on the manager’s discretion about how long she thinks it really takes to learn the job, but what happens if that hypothetical autistic new hire figures it out at only 3 months? Well, let’s say the manager decides to threaten to get rid of her for being late 4 times in 90 days and for being “too stupid to catch on to her job.” She doesn’t realize the same employee knows that saying that is definitely verbally abusive — which is illegal — and says as much to both the manager and the HR rep when they put her on a performance improvement plan. That’s also called a PIP, which is the last step before getting fired. They might be facing a major lawsuit if the employee can find a good attorney experienced in winning disability-related cases. The company better hope that the employee doesn’t know where to look for one. It would be even worse if they were in a major American city because those types of lawyers would be so much easier to find.It is shocking that employers are still doing this after I’ve been in the workforce for over three decades. But change is coming.There’s so much more acceptance and awareness of neurodivergence now, especially compared to what it was when I was in elementary school in small-town Michigan 40+ years ago. I can actually find an audience of people who sometimes want to read what I want to write about, and when I’m really lucky, some of my views clearly resonate with a whole lot of people. You have no idea how warm and fuzzy that makes me feel inside. Thank you.Thankfully, the workplace is changing, too. There are a whole lot more people like me now in the lower ranks (and probably even more in the upper ranks, I expect) and I feel something new: acceptance and understanding. Some particularly progressive companies even see my uniqueness as valuable enough that they’ll provide a shift that starts at noon because a whole lot of us neurodivergent people have <a href="https://www.tiimoapp.com/blog/neurodivergent-people-and-time-perception">issues with time</a>, especially a <a href="https://neurodivergentinsights.com/blog/autism-adhd-and-sleep">later circadian rhythm</a>. I have trouble waking up, but once I’m awake, I can go for hours and hours with rarely lagging focus if my work has enough variety to keep my brain engaged and I have good coffee to drink every few hours to keep me going. That sounds pretty damn autistic.I get obsessed with stuff on a regular basis: food, music, a new interest. This also makes sense because having a nearly obsessive train of thought AT ALL is yet another defining hallmark of autism. But because autism is a spectrum and every case is unique, mine happens to be that I’m extremely verbally gifted, yet I’m definitely not stupid at all. I’m just bad at math.Of course, I’m autistic. And that’s more than okay. (I don’t fully believe that yet but I’m working on it, like so many other things I’m also working on.) I am so happy to see that the world of the future is much more accessible and I’m only beginning to understand what “accessibility” really means. The only companies that will survive are the ones who pay attention to inclusion and nothing makes my heart happier.</article></body>

The life-changing impact of discovering my undiagnosed autism

I guess I’ve always had a “gift,” although, for most of my life, it was actually more of a curse.

I grew up as an undiagnosed autistic with parents and teachers who desperately wanted me to be normal. It often felt like even my own parents were bullying me. Most of the time, people just thought I was weird, so they stayed as far away from me as possible. I only now understand why they did. (The same was true for my husband but I don’t think he ever knew he was really autistic until nearly the end of his life, which makes me so sad.)

This dawning awareness makes me realize the role my undiagnosed autism has played in almost all of my relationships — if not my entire life.

One of the biggest ways in which I’m abnormal in my adult life is that I still tend to be extremely naive and gullible, which is a major sign of being autistic. Being too trusting isn’t joke fodder or something to abuse, but far too many people do it anyway because they can still get away with it, similar to the way they discriminate against fat people (which I’ve heard described as “the last acceptable form of prejudice.”) I’m learning how to overcome that with some social skills training that I should have gotten as a child if anyone had known what to do with me.

Looking into early childhood interventions for autism lets me see how many tools they have to help autistics now and that makes me feel hope for future autistics. It’s not a worse brain after all, just a different brain. Thank God some companies are finally starting to wake up to that. You wouldn’t believe how bad it feels simply to be different in a way that you can’t do much about in the first place. I am just now — at almost 50 — becoming able to see my entire life in a completely different light, just by recognizing the fact that I actually, really was autistic all along and nobody knew it. Not even I did.

There have been a record number of lawsuits filed against companies for violating the protection that’s legally guaranteed to people whose brains think differently under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in recent years and they’re continuing to increase. Yet companies are still insisting that there’s only one “right” way to think — to both their employees and customers alike — and refuse to admit they’re engaging in active discrimination against both groups every day. It’s just too profitable for them to ignore it.

It would be especially bad for a software company if one of the managers over the frontline employees were discriminating against a recently hired autistic woman who was masking for her own safety (though not very well-masking at all) because she was especially vulnerable. She mentioned her disability more than once, including from the beginning, and invoked the ADA, but she was still told she had no choice but to adapt to their rules. The only accommodation she asked for was the right to work from home on days when she didn’t sleep well the night before and she was still told no. I don’t personally know very much about the law at all, but that sounds like a lawsuit any lawyer would at least consider taking.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that this same software company completely ignores the comments from their customers that their software is hard to use and extremely unintuitive. Their whole business model is based on continuing to use manufacturing-related software programs that look a lot like the ones used in the 90s and have barely been updated. They don’t know they’re on the brink of bankruptcy if they don’t realize they can’t get away with abusing their employees and customers alike because they keep ignoring that some people’s brains just work differently and that’s okay because the law says it is.

This software company really needs to convert some job titles into fairly paid UX researchers PDQ, especially because they rely so heavily on their grossly underpaid frontline agents. Those same employees can’t even afford the good healthcare they offer to every company employee; the only ones who can afford it are the ones the company considers “important enough.”

Thinking there are “important” and “unimportant” classes of employees sounds a lot like discrimination, too, but it’s hard to prove if your brain doesn’t understand why some people would want to discriminate against others in the first place. That trait sounds an awful lot like an autistic one.

Imagine that the same software company tells their employees to think more like detectives investigating a case while they’re doing their work. That sounds an awful lot like the very definition of a UX role without anywhere close to the compensation. They even call their entry-level employees customer experience agents. They’re so clearly offering such an obvious clue in the very job title and getting away with it. Meanwhile, they’re paying them and treating them as though they’re ordinary customer service reps.

They’re paying entry-level user experience researchers almost half what they should be. And they’re getting away with it by a slight title change from the more accurately descriptive “researcher” to a much worse “agent.” They also think they can trick their employees into never catching on by spelling out the word experience instead of the more correctly used “X” because they really believe their employees are too dumb to figure it out. Most of them actually never catch on to it because they’ve been discriminated against for their whole lives.

It almost looks like they’re even promoting their brightest employees based on when they seem like they’re on the verge of realizing what their actual work is before they walk away. That ALSO sounds like clear discrimination but being unable to understand why people would want to discriminate against others sounds like a pretty autistic trait. They require being on the job for 6 months to allow employees the “privilege” of working from home full-time, even though the company regularly tells all employees that they sometimes have to work from home when it suits their business purposes because it’s so easily done.

The “6-month” requirement is based solely on the manager’s discretion about how long she thinks it really takes to learn the job, but what happens if that hypothetical autistic new hire figures it out at only 3 months? Well, let’s say the manager decides to threaten to get rid of her for being late 4 times in 90 days and for being “too stupid to catch on to her job.” She doesn’t realize the same employee knows that saying that is definitely verbally abusive — which is illegal — and says as much to both the manager and the HR rep when they put her on a performance improvement plan. That’s also called a PIP, which is the last step before getting fired. They might be facing a major lawsuit if the employee can find a good attorney experienced in winning disability-related cases. The company better hope that the employee doesn’t know where to look for one. It would be even worse if they were in a major American city because those types of lawyers would be so much easier to find.

It is shocking that employers are still doing this after I’ve been in the workforce for over three decades. But change is coming.

There’s so much more acceptance and awareness of neurodivergence now, especially compared to what it was when I was in elementary school in small-town Michigan 40+ years ago. I can actually find an audience of people who sometimes want to read what I want to write about, and when I’m really lucky, some of my views clearly resonate with a whole lot of people. You have no idea how warm and fuzzy that makes me feel inside. Thank you.

Thankfully, the workplace is changing, too. There are a whole lot more people like me now in the lower ranks (and probably even more in the upper ranks, I expect) and I feel something new: acceptance and understanding. Some particularly progressive companies even see my uniqueness as valuable enough that they’ll provide a shift that starts at noon because a whole lot of us neurodivergent people have issues with time, especially a later circadian rhythm. I have trouble waking up, but once I’m awake, I can go for hours and hours with rarely lagging focus if my work has enough variety to keep my brain engaged and I have good coffee to drink every few hours to keep me going. That sounds pretty damn autistic.

I get obsessed with stuff on a regular basis: food, music, a new interest. This also makes sense because having a nearly obsessive train of thought AT ALL is yet another defining hallmark of autism. But because autism is a spectrum and every case is unique, mine happens to be that I’m extremely verbally gifted, yet I’m definitely not stupid at all. I’m just bad at math.

Of course, I’m autistic. And that’s more than okay. (I don’t fully believe that yet but I’m working on it, like so many other things I’m also working on.) I am so happy to see that the world of the future is much more accessible and I’m only beginning to understand what “accessibility” really means. The only companies that will survive are the ones who pay attention to inclusion and nothing makes my heart happier.