> You have it flipped. "This group of people with a neurodevelopmental disorder are more inclined to X and therefore industry of X has more of them."
> Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.
The point was the severity. 1 to 2 persons in a thousand, and you think this is sizeable enough to impact a whole industry which is not really small at all? To colour a whole industry? To such a degree that everyone or a majority is on the autism spectrum, to refer to your last paragraph? Ridiculous. Not to mention that would require all people with autism to be functioning enough to maintain a job. Assuming I would even accept your pulled-out-of-your-hat numbers.
What is effectively being said is that many of those nerd archetypes are born out of, or affected to a large degree, by people with neurodevelopmental disorder. A great springboard for people who hate nerds to claim that they are suffering from a kind of arrested development or other non-normal deficiency, for sure.
> I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.
You're right that it wasn't as much of a statement about it being wrong as it was a statement like this betrays his attitude towards the tech industry. Hint: I didn't ever say that it being an outlandish belief made it wrong, for crying out loud! The mention of 1-2 in a thousand was more of a reference to how it was unlikely, however.
Maybe I'll start to consider the veracity of this claim itself when I see some effort to prove it one way or the other. But I don't have much patience for complacent musings on deficits of a whole group of people.
> I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?
But that wasn't the comparison to begin with. The implicit comparison was with people who have a lack of empathy and social inclination due to neurodevelopment disorder, and normal people. Now if we change that comparison to people in general -- on average normal -- who can either be inclined to be people-oriented or not, then this becomes a whole other question. Not even objectionable anymore!
I thought that we were about to move beyond viewing people who choose to, or somehow have less talent for, being social as being underdeveloped in some way[1]. Apparently not. Do we ever hear about extra talkative or otherwise people-oriented people being deficit in some way? No, of course not. Such people are just good, normal people. Apparently people with some kind of high intellect (not that all such people have that) must have traded something else in some way, but people who are people-focused are just well-rounded and overall fantastic. Maybe we should also discuss one of those ridiculous tropes about how some high-powered jobs are "filled"[2] with people who are apparently sociable and outgoing, but really are sociopaths. Right? No one would ever be offended by that.
[1] In the sense of being medically diagnosed with autism.
[2] Again: it's the relative quantity that makes these discussions absurd. Certainly without any extraordinary evidence to back them up.
> Would you rather take coding advice from the person who wrote a ball of mud in PHP, or John Carmack?
Depends on what I'm doing. Maybe I'm indeed going to write some ball of mud (unmaintainable, one-off, but perhaps faster to write) PHP code? I reject your hero worship.
> Interesting that she is autistic. Autism is apparently more common among boys than girls. Could this be one reason why tech attracts more men than women?
"Maybe this group of people has more of X because X is more likely to have a neurodevelopmental disorder"? Nice. Thank you so much for associating a whole industry with autism.
A disorder that apparently 1-2 out of 1,000 people have, at that.
> Sometimes these things are easy to miss, but once you are on the lookout its a slippery slope to thinking that almost everything happening to you is because of your gender and its good to call people out on that.
Why wouldn't you shoehorn a language who's ergonomics and limitations have been argued for by how it would fit for concurrent (web)server code in larger projects into application development? I mean, err...
> Millenials have a relatively low birth rate compared to the Gen Xers at the same age, due, perhaps, to the economic situation. If you are not raising kids, you have a lot more free time and energy to pour into other things.
So many activities to do in this day and age and in this economy. You can surf the Web so much..!
If it so happens that people who are having problems with the running time of tests have something like on the order of as much test code as they have "actual" code, I'm not surprised that they have to optimize the test suite. Apparently that was a trend some time ago (I don't know if it still is).
Spotify on Linux: clicking on things often feels slightly janky and laggy. How fitting!
And the spacebar will 80% of the time page down rather than pause the music, something which sounds minor but which makes the user experience 50% more annoying for me. Do most people even use spacebar to page down in normal webpages!?
The quote consists of seven words, where a word in this context is a lexical unit that consists of alphanumeric characters, and the words are separated by some kind of whitespace.
> Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.
The point was the severity. 1 to 2 persons in a thousand, and you think this is sizeable enough to impact a whole industry which is not really small at all? To colour a whole industry? To such a degree that everyone or a majority is on the autism spectrum, to refer to your last paragraph? Ridiculous. Not to mention that would require all people with autism to be functioning enough to maintain a job. Assuming I would even accept your pulled-out-of-your-hat numbers.
What is effectively being said is that many of those nerd archetypes are born out of, or affected to a large degree, by people with neurodevelopmental disorder. A great springboard for people who hate nerds to claim that they are suffering from a kind of arrested development or other non-normal deficiency, for sure.
> I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.
You're right that it wasn't as much of a statement about it being wrong as it was a statement like this betrays his attitude towards the tech industry. Hint: I didn't ever say that it being an outlandish belief made it wrong, for crying out loud! The mention of 1-2 in a thousand was more of a reference to how it was unlikely, however.
Maybe I'll start to consider the veracity of this claim itself when I see some effort to prove it one way or the other. But I don't have much patience for complacent musings on deficits of a whole group of people.
> I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?
But that wasn't the comparison to begin with. The implicit comparison was with people who have a lack of empathy and social inclination due to neurodevelopment disorder, and normal people. Now if we change that comparison to people in general -- on average normal -- who can either be inclined to be people-oriented or not, then this becomes a whole other question. Not even objectionable anymore!
I thought that we were about to move beyond viewing people who choose to, or somehow have less talent for, being social as being underdeveloped in some way[1]. Apparently not. Do we ever hear about extra talkative or otherwise people-oriented people being deficit in some way? No, of course not. Such people are just good, normal people. Apparently people with some kind of high intellect (not that all such people have that) must have traded something else in some way, but people who are people-focused are just well-rounded and overall fantastic. Maybe we should also discuss one of those ridiculous tropes about how some high-powered jobs are "filled"[2] with people who are apparently sociable and outgoing, but really are sociopaths. Right? No one would ever be offended by that.
[1] In the sense of being medically diagnosed with autism.
[2] Again: it's the relative quantity that makes these discussions absurd. Certainly without any extraordinary evidence to back them up.