This is why I prefer typing over speaking. I can go back and proofread what I said before I say it. When I speak, all that comes out half of the time is word salad.
Also, you know, the searchable record which gets created. I legitimately don't understand why some people insist on having important conversations in real time when that conversation just vanishes instantly into the ether once it is finished
Shit, I'm over 50 years old and it's the first time i encounter people describing my daily chicken run through social hellscape. For once, it feels nice not to be alone.
People don't understand that I choose every word carefully in a sentence to convey the most meaning and answer follow-up questions up front. Then they think I said something that literally contradicts what I said or that I already accounted for in my first sentence.
Yes I'm a programmer with Autism and ADHD, why do you ask?
Sometimes it feels like the classic you said you like croissants, that must mean you hate bagels
You put in so much effort to make your point crystal clear, choosing your words extra carefully to form a sentence that means exactly what you need it to mean, and then some people just interpret the wildest things.
Autistic here. I've described this to people and I'm so happy to hear other people describing it too. I hate feeling like nobody understands me, so I appreciate this a lot.
I do this enough that I'm convinced my friends gaslight me. It would be easier to just say that I'll watch something later. Instead I'll tell someone I know of it and why I haven't watched it yet. Easy for them to interpret I'm not interested and then later they'll tell me I'm not interested in it and I'll be very confused and then multiple people will agree.
The problem is that they probably never gaslight me, and that fear stems from a situation where I so vividly internalise a situation that leads to the conclusion they don't gaslight me that I forget the end result. The example being I have no idea which pronunciation of yoghurt is American and Which is British, because I used to be made fun of for saying it wrong. I only remember I was made fun of, I don't remember what I used to say or what the right way is.
Edit: The fact I bring up yoghurt tells you everything
the ADHD tendency to write stuff as lengthy and precise as possible vs the ADHD inability to read anything longer than two paragraphs (or less depending on how tired we are)... irresistible force meets immovable object
This is also generally true for software engineers.
In my own experience, the difficulty is that you basically have to teach someone software engineering before they even kind of understand what youre saying before they believe you.
Which is basically 99% of people, especially in a work setting.
The very rare 1% of people will usually give up and go, well, youre the expert, probably you know what youre talking about.
The rest will be angered by their own dunning-krueger effect and/or ego and be abusive.
EDIT: This is 100% true when talking to a video game player, unless they are somehow also a programmer.
There are 0 exceptions to the category of someone who has only played video games. None of them anything about programming, and they will be more angry and rude than the general public.
The art in this is to know/guess where you have to dumb down things how far to get your point across.
For example, I'm often explaining Kubernetes to business people as "a layer on top of our servers, so we can define which apps we want to run and how, k8s then sorts itself out, how exactly to deploy everything". That's wildly simplified, but usually gives them a rough idea of what they're dealing with.
I've had to endure a coworker explaining k8s by starting with manifests, then switching over to volume claims, finally something about ingresses... He was talking to a guy from a government office, whose job it was to do administrative tasks. That guy had no idea what my coworker was talking about and left the meeting more confused than before.
Unfortunately for myself at least I seem to be faaar too autistic to be able to do this.
I am good at writing code, writing queries, solving interoperability problems, analyzing large data sets, and I can even manage to present reports in ways that are statistically valid but summarized to narratives.
What I cannot handle is my bosses bosses boss insisting I use an entirely new software I have never used before to solve a problem that we can already solve with software we have, for a problem that would not be a problem if she had listened to either my boss, my bosses boss, or the leads of all the other teams who have all been saying the same thing for months.
This kind of thing has happened to me at every single tech role I have ever worked.
Logic means nothing. What matters is the high up thinks something is 'neat' and theres no way they can be told, directly, or indirectly, that they have no clue what theyre talking about.
As an engineer who plays games, it drives me fucking nuts how much influence forum users and streamers are given when it comes to ongoing game design. It very clearly has ruined many games, and there are times when the user base just need to be ignored. Or at least managed better.
This is very true. I work with a lot of software developers and most of them have huge egos. I started in a business role and moved to software engineer and am really gold at not letting my ego take over. I always take criticism and try to get better.
In my experience I have learned as much as I could from other software engineers and rarely had problems with them.
Of course their absolutely are software engineers with huge egos.
In my own experience at least, I worked with many who were very humble, and higher ups walked all over us and abused us and refused to listen to huge problems with plans we were instructed to carry out, and then we were blamed for not doing the thing that would never work in the first place.
Not trying to boast, but I appear to be one of the "smartest" people in my field. My evidence for this is that regardless of what company I work for, and I've worked for several at this point in my career, I become the "go to" person for solving complex issues that stump my co-workers. I often can solve whatever problem brought them to me in a reasonable time frame, or at least propose a solution that will lead to the desired outcome.
Personally, I would mainly attribute this to my propensity for learning everything I can about everything I touch. I'm not just looking for the "how do I make this work" of it, I'm always looking for "why is it broken and what do I need to do to make it not broken". It's a small difference, but the former is very results focused, fix it, regardless of whether the solution makes sense, and the latter is understanding the issue and finding a way to make it work from there. I don't think I have any special ability or intelligence that others don't have, nor that I'm smarter or better than anyone.
I spent years studying human behaviour. I'm certain I've lost friends due to my efforts. I spent a lot of time carefully paying attention to everything from body language, tone, phrasing, vocabulary, speech pacing.... Just everything I possibly could. I examined the presentation of statements and the responses based on all those factors to try to find trends for how to approach making statements that people reacted positively to.
I'm neurodivergent, I have ADHD. I may have a touch of autism in there but that's never been checked nor verified, so I hesitate to say that I'm on that spectrum. I feel as though people are far too frequently saying that "I think I'm autistic" or something of the sort, without any proof thereof, and IMO, that cheapens the diagnosis. We've seen such callous disregard of serious disorders before, particularly with OCD and statements like "I'm a little OCD". Unless you've been diagnosed with the condition, you're not. You probably don't understand OCD well enough to say whether any activity is classifiably OCD or not, and the misuse of the term has led to it becoming a meme at this point. I don't want to contribute to that happening to another condition.
Regardless: after years of effort and observation, I have been described as helpful and approachable, which has always been my aim.
I know of people whom I would consider to be easily more intelligent than I am, who get regarded as combative and difficult; mainly because they haven't spent as much time as I have examining the nuances of communication and putting in active efforts to adjust how their statements are made so that they are recieved in a more positive light. They have, instead, spent most of their time enhancing their knowledge, and have understanding in many complex topics that I simply have not spent the time learning in order to understand.
I explain all of this to contribute to your point. Social capability does not and should not imply someone's intelligence or knowledge. There's a lot of factors that go into someone's perception of another person that aren't things that you can really quantify well. From emotional intelligence, tone, the phrasing of the words used, even the selection of words, among many other factors, can be very deceptive in demonstrating someone's intelligence.
There's also the factor of having a deep knowledge in something you're interested in, and a very limited knowledge of everything else. You can be extremely well spoken in your area of expertise and make completely irrational and insane statements regarding things you know little about. There's also the matter of vocabulary. Even very well larned topics can be portrayed as something you know little about, simply because you either lack the vocabulary to speak about it, or that your vocabulary on the topic is so advanced that it comes across like you don't know what you're talking about, since nobody knows what you're saying, and it sounds like you're making things up to sound like you know more than you do.
There's a lot of factors here and there all important to the perception of whether a person is intelligent or not.
I've worked with plenty of people who were regarded as "brilliant" by management and a few other employees (from different departments). And nearly every time it was they were just really charismatic. Like, they could have easily have been highly successful as a used car salesmen at a junk yard.
Just take anyone who speaks a second language and ask them to explain their expertise in the second language. Almost everyone will start sounding stupid trying to do the translation in their head to the second language.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think said person is stupid at all. There's just difficulty speaking about a concept you would innately know and have learned in one language and translate it to a second one. Except for all those genius polyglots out there of course.
That only applies to people who don't speak that language well enough to go straight from concept to words in that language in their minds, without passing via an intermediary language.
People who need to translate between languages in their heads as they speak in a second language are at the same level in speaking foreign languages as those who need to count with their fingers are in Maths.
On the upside, once you start going directly from concept to words in a language you're reasonable good at, it becomes possible to do it in languages you're not at all good at.
I have a bit of a different experience. As an engineer, I mostly use English at work, so I usually have issues explaining my area of expertise in my mother tongue and other languages I know. There are lots of terms I know only the English words , so I end up using the term in English or try to translate it and it sounds stupid.
That depends on how you learn the second language. I speak three languages, but I learned them organically. If I speak in English, then I also think in English at that time. But that leads to a different problem - I cannot translate between languages I know. I can explain what is written in language A to a person speaking language B, but that won't be a translation, it will be just a free form description. My brain just don't have connections between words in different languages. I understand them, but can't make links between them.
It is easy to answer that particular question. I'd just answer with: Probably somewhere at B1 or B2 level, although I haven't been assessed in ages regarding that.
To be fair though, most engineers I know overestimate their intelligence and just ignore entire fields of knowledge. And are even weirdly proud of that. Cringe
I used to work in an engineering firm and the way I'd explain some of my coworkers' inanity to my wife at dinner is that the engineering mindset is to search for simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and in cases where there is no such simple solution (let's take social or political issues as a common thread, here) that tends to lead to the engineer preferring a spherical-chickens-in-a-vacuum oversimplification over the complex and nuanced reality -- usually accompanied by protestations that "If only people would act rationally!" their ideas would work and make things better.
There's some overlap as well between engineers and the sort of mentality that one is a disembodied intelligence piloting a meat puppet, which feeds into those sorts of thought patterns. Like, dude, you may think of yourself as a purely logical being, but the fact of the matter is that like all of us you're a bodge-job mess of higher-order thinking strapped to a tribal ape with duct tape and baling wire. You can't ignore the rough edges that come with that if you want to find social or political ideas that actually work.
Have you fucking met me? And English not being my native language makes it 10 times worse. There is always this "translation layer" that I have to process everything I hear/say through.
Which is why I gave up talking to clients unless I have to. That and they don't listen anyway.
"Spec calls for this part"
"They stopped making that part in 2003"
"YOU WILL FOLLOW THE SPEC AND DO WHAT I SAY OR I WILL SUE YOU AND BACK CHARGE YOU AND YELL AT YOUR MANAGER DEMANDING THAT HE FIRE YOU AND YOU ARE BEING RUDE AND I HAVE YOU KNOW I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR 80 YEARS..."
In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we're absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens).
I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider's perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.
I work under engineers. They spend enormous effort articulating complex solutions to simple problem. If anything theyre the opposite of what this meme implies: they are very dense but use flowery language to disguise it.
I'm an engineers who works with engineers. There are no rules. You have the dumb smoothtalkers and the smart... dumbtalkers.
It's pretty entertaining seeing management eat the bullshit some engineers give them. It's a crime for a manager not to be technical or at least have understanding of what is going on. If you want to see an engineer fucking a manager, put a manager who doesn't know shit about engineering.
Define "intelligent". I know a lot of engineers through my job, they may be professionally competent, but ... Let me give you a short example: The engineer that actually was the team leader building a huge crane on tracks parks his car behind that thing in the blind spot for the operator. Shortly before a test. There went his beloved Jaguar. Old, but true story.
I can speak intelligently, but put a pen in my hand and ask me to write down the same thing and my hand won't move. Tests in school involving more than a sentence were torturous. Essays were brutal.
I was in school before computers were available for anything other than computer class. They did help as typing was a far easier method to get things out of my head.
Let me share my point of view as a programmer: The average person has no clue how detailed a computer program needs to be. You may think, “this process has only three steps, yadda, flubber and diddly”, but when you sit down and try to program this, you start asking questions like “if the user removes the program during the yadda process, should we add zero flubberees into the diddlydoo and send it off or should we not send the diddlydoo, and should the user be notified? Or should we maybe try to reinstall the program and start again from the yadda? Does it make sense to keep the inputs from the flubber, or is this likely a new process that’s independent from the first attempt? Is it sensible to enter a non-integer number of flubberees? A negative number? No number at all? Do we need to tell other users that a user is concurrently doing this process?
Engineers are good at following certain rules to solve a very specific, if broad, subset of human problems.
It sure as fuck don't make them intelligent.
I wouldn't trust an engineer to be able to solve the most trivial societal issues we face over some tennis player's.
Our strength as a species comes from every single one of us going in depth and be experts at the most random things. Being a supreme expert at any one thing does not mean you are a supreme expert at every single thing.
Engineers are good at following certain rules to solve a very specific, if broad, subset of human problems.
HEY! I'm not good at following rules to solve very specific problems. I solve problems, some of the time, but rules are seldom involved. It's mostly luck and caffeine.
It sure as fuck don't make them intelligent.
First off, as a mentally underdeveloped engineer, I can say that fucking is never a certainty. I don't know if that invalidates the rest of your sentence but... Secondly we're generally dumb as bricks.