Knowing What To Look For – An Autism Job Story
The following job story is contributed by Isaac Dealey, founder of Autelligent Laboratories (http://www.autlabs.com). You can follow Isaac on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/datafaucet and also find him on Facebook.
I celebrated my 35th birthday this month, and like a lot of people on the autistic spectrum, my job history is a bit unusual. I feel rather lucky that, through hard work I’ve achieved notoriety and personal success in my career, having presented at conferences in the software engineering industry and having been a volunteer member of the somewhat prestigious Team Macromedia and now the Adobe Community Experts. At the same time however, I’ve also found myself in a lot of bad and short-lived jobs and at least one company at which the work environment was actively hostile.
Although I can’t say that I have practical, applied experience that’s allowed me to find a good company and a stable job, I do believe that there are some valuable lessons to be learned from my experiences. I’ve learned for example not to mention the names of any of the companies where I’ve experienced poor work environments in the past. This is always a concern for future or potential employers, even when they’re in no danger of repeating the same mistakes.
Let me start by making a broad generalization. Companies and hiring managers often sabotage themselves. They don’t intend to sabotage themselves; they simply don’t realize that they make poor decisions during the hiring process that lead to groupthink and the stifling of innovation.
I saw one example recently posted as a video on the job site Dice.com. The video asked the question “should you point out mistakes the company has made during an interview?” For example, I’m a software engineer, and software in general is moving to the web. Knowing that I have an interview scheduled with a company I might visit their website to do a little research about the company before the interview (I’m told that hiring managers like this). In the process of my research I may find problems with their website. They’re typically not large problems: a broken link here or there, usually in an old article. This is however where the company’s self-sabotage begins.
The advice from Dice.com (and others) is never to point out these kinds of mistakes during an interview. As far as I can tell, this is good advice despite the fact that the end result is bad for the company. Here’s why. These kinds of mistakes are normal and even expected, so they don’t reflect badly on anyone, and no one should feel ashamed because of them. So logically, no one should feel hurt if you point them out either. On the other hand, mentioning these things could inform the employer that you’re observant. This is something they should want to know if, like most companies, they say the ideal candidate needs “attention to detail”. Further once they know about the problem, they can add it to their to-do list to fix it, which also helps them.
Lastly rejecting a candidate because they are candid enough to risk mentioning a mistake during a job interview helps to ensure homogeneity within the company, which leads to groupthink. The real problem here is that problems will not be addressed (until it is too late) if the employees are not comfortable to candidly discuss them before they occur. If the hiring manager has done a good job of weeding out people who have the candidness to express concerns, then the manager’s ideas will never be critically analyzed or tested. His ideas will simply be allowed to fail, even when his employees could have prevented it. This is precisely the problem that the word “groupthink” was coined to describe.
One other way that employers sometimes sabotage themselves during interviews is with the question “what is your biggest weakness?” I had to be told not to give an honest answer to this question, because the employer doesn’t want an honest answer. I’m told that you should describe a job-related skill that is actually not a weakness, but that is a skill in which you have less experience. I’m also told that you’re supposed to give it a “positive spin”, expressing that your “weakness” will soon be a strength. So in my case I might say “I’ve been learning a lot about Flex recently because I haven’t had much experience with it yet.”
Several recent scientific studies have also shown that “ingratiating behavior” plays a major role in both the hiring process and in reviews and executive board appointments. Ingratiating behavior is divided into three categories: complements, favors and opinion conformity. Complements and favors should be self-explanatory. I honestly see nothing wrong with telling a potential employer that I like a poster on his wall, or bringing donuts to share with the office once in a while after you’ve been hired. That last measure of ingratiating behavior however is the one that many employers really sabotage themselves with. Although complements and favors shouldn’t factor into a person’s hiring, they are less dangerous by comparison. Opinion conformity happens when a boss presents an idea to an employee and instead of expressing concerns about the idea, the employee simply expresses support for it, saying “that’s a great idea”. In one of my programming jobs for example, my boss might come to me and say “hey, I just found this talking head widget to put on our website”. I may already know that the tool he’s describing is known to cause some real problems. If I don’t mention those problems and instead say, “yeah, we could really use that on our website”, then I’ve engaged in opinion conformity.
What’s unfortunate about opinion conformity is that hiring managers generally expect it during an interview, the same way they expect you not to mention any mistakes the company might have made. It’s unfortunate because this is a great way to encourage groupthink within the company and of course the stifling of innovation and other big problems that come with it. It’s simply another way that companies sabotage themselves. But if you really want to get the job, it will probably be necessary for you to display opinion conformity during the interview, even though you know that it hurts the company.
Unfortunately it seems getting past the interview usually requires that we humor a poor decision-making process on the part of the interviewers. At the same time however, the interview is also a time in which we should be learning about the company and deciding if we want to work there. So we need to interview the company as much as they are interviewing us. I had always heard this, but until recently had no idea what questions to ask during an interview. I think I’ve started to find some answers about that in the work of a scientist named Carol Dweck. In reading her book titled Mindset, I believe I discovered that a large part of my difficulty retaining jobs stems from having made poor choices about which jobs to accept. In fact, I believe that I’ve actively sought out companies that were horrible places to work, simply because I didn’t know how to identify the warning signs of a bad company.
In her book Mindset, Dweck describes what she called the “fixed” mindset and the “growth” mindset. A fixed mindset is what you have when you believe that a particular quality is permanent and cannot be changed. For example, you probably believe that you cannot change your height, so you have a fixed mindset about that quality. A growth mindset is what you have when you believe that a particular quality can be learned and improved. For example you were not born talking, you had to learn, starting with a few words, then sentences, and eventually you learned to read. So you probably have a growth mindset about your language skill, believing that you can learn new words to grow your vocabulary if you need to.
What is most important about these mindsets, (at least to me) is the effect your mindset regarding intelligence has on your behavior. Through years of research, Dweck has discovered that people who have fixed mindsets about intelligence become insecure; they have delicate egos, fear failure, are perpetual underachievers, lie, are vengeful, and need constant validation or ego stroking. People with growth mindsets about intelligence exhibit exactly the opposite qualities – they seek challenges, work hard, embrace and learn from failures and forgive easily.
These outcomes are actually both very logical outcomes of their beliefs regarding intelligence. A person who grows up believing that “you are only so smart, and that’s for life” is immediately in competition with everyone else in the room to be the smartest person. They do not attempt to improve their intelligence because they do not believe it is possible. They fear failure because they perceive failure as a permanent mark on their record of being smart. For this reason they also tend to think that hard work is “something you do if you’re not smart”. They reason that, if you are only so smart for your entire life, then how hard you work is a product of how smart you are. It simply doesn’t occur to them that some people might be both smart and hard-working. They become underachievers because they fear failure, and so they find excuses to turn down opportunities to work on more challenging projects because they fear that the project might fail and it would reflect badly on them. At the same time they also need the constant validation that other people think of them as smart, so they’re not willing to allow others to critically examine or in many cases even question their ideas. Questioning their ideas might reveal that the idea was of poor quality or needed work, either of which they perceive as a permanent negative mark on their record of being “smart”. All of these things together make for very bad, sometimes hostile work environments.
This is admittedly a simplification. Like autism, fixed and growth mindsets are a spectrum. Some people are more growth-oriented and some people are more fixed-oriented. If we want to find good, positive and supportive work environments however, it is absolutely essential that we learn to recognize the growth mindset during job interviews. This is where I went wrong in many of the job choices I have made.
I’ve been a software engineer for a decade, and like many autistic people, I spend a lot of my own free time working hard at my trade and so I’ve become very good at it. I started in 1998 and I’ve been an “advanced” programmer since about 2000. So I’ve generally looked for job descriptions that included words like “advanced” or “expert”. This by itself may be fine, but unfortunately I’ve also responded to a lot of job listings in which the company’s HR manager (or often enough their owner) described their staff as “smart” or “intelligent”. These kinds of descriptions can often be indicators that the employer has a fixed mindset about intelligence and will be a very bad work environment.
Thinking back over my job history, I’ve noticed that when I worked at a company where the owner or managers described their staff as “smart” were also the companies least willing to entertain suggestions and most likely to reprimand me for writing software that was “too advanced” (this happened to me on at least three separate occasions). The problem is that the managers at those companies have particularly delicate egos and need to be perceived as “the brains” behind their operation, instead of being perceived as a valuable part of the team. As a result they cannot allow any of their employees to point out mistakes or suggest changes that could potentially lead to a perception that the employee might be “smarter” than them. Instead they expect you to be a “team player” by simply displaying opinion conformity.
By comparison if the company describes themselves as flexible, experimental, a place where people are always learning, those are indicators that the employer has a more growth-oriented mindset and should be a much better place to work. Often near the end of an interview, the interviewer will ask if you have any questions for them. I’m told that you should always ask something, but I honestly never had any clue what to ask. I am still trying to discover a good way to use this opportunity to help identify the growth mindset. I don’t have a solid strategy yet, however, some of my thoughts include:
What personality traits do you most look for in an employee? (If the hiring manager says anything like “smart” or “intelligent”, it’s probably not a great place to work. If he says something like “a willingness to learn”, that’s a much more desirable answer.)
Do you look for smart employees or are you more concerned with a person’s ability to learn? (I’m not sure if this is a good question or not. This is much more direct than the question about personality traits, I just don’t know if it’s too direct, or if it might tip-off the interviewer to give you the answer you want to hear instead of giving you an honest answer. It may be a good follow-up to the question about personality traits if you feel the previous answer didn’t give you enough information about the company’s mindset.)
Do you have any kind of continuing education, for example, brown bag lunches where employees present new techniques? (In the IT industry a “brown bag lunch” is an event at which the team meets during lunch and one member demonstrates a new technology or technique, much like a user-group presentation. Knowing that the company does something like this as a group, shows that they are actively engaged in continued learning. This is a good indicator of growth-oriented mindsets. I think the term “brown bag lunch” stems from the fact that employees in the IT industry often eat out, but that you are expected to bring a packed lunch from home on days when these presentations are given.)
What is your process for handling mistakes? (At any job, regardless of the industry, there should be a process in place for managing mistakes. Employees should not be arbitrarily punished for making mistakes. People are human and mistakes will be made. If an employer punishes people for being human, then they are creating a hostile work environment. This has been the case in several of the IT jobs I’ve held, in which programmers were sometimes severely reprimanded or fired for making mistakes, despite the fact that the company sabotaged themselves by not hiring any Quality Assurance (QA) staff. How the company manages mistakes can also be a good indicator of their mindset, whether fixed or growth-oriented. If they have a fixed mindset, they are likely to punish people for mistakes. If they have a growth mindset, they will instead try to create procedures that help them to learn from mistakes and hopefully prevent repeat mistakes.)
Hopefully with this information about employer expectations and about the differences between fixed and growth mindsets, you’ll be able to avoid the mistakes I’ve made and identify better places to work. Keep looking for that good job and good luck!
What a great essay and wonderful advice! Thank you for sharing your experiences and observations. These are valuable tips for everyone, not just those on the autism spectrum!
Thanks Barbara.
It occurred to me earlier today that there’s a great film called Meet the Robinsons that does a great job of showing and explaining the growth mindset without feeling (at least to me) like it’s beating you over the head with the lesson. It’s a rare exception to the rule that I don’t much care for Disney films. 
Oh and PS I’ve also been working on this other project to help create jobs for people on the autistic spectrum at http://www.autlabs.com
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