Autism and programming

Question

There are some companies which prefer autists as programmers since they seem to have special capabilities.
Did you know about it?
Whats your opinion?

Answer 1

Very interesting topic.

There are millions of different ways to be a "person with autism". A french famous philosopher/writer/traveller, Joseph Schovanec (himself happy possesor of some autism) proposes to use this label, one of the reason to do so being that it can then be complemented by "person without autism" when speaking of the unlucky other humans (half joking).

One general (not always true) fact about persons with autism is that their brain is less filtering the flow of incoming informations. Human brain is a crazy compressor, Our senses, are producing such a huge flow of data, there is no way it could be used "uncompressed". The compression process takes many different forms. Having this compression less active, can be a source of stress. When 10 people are speaking in the same time around you, and you're involved in a conversation with one of them only, you're (usually) able to focus on this particular person and even if the other voices are loud enough to be heard, you will not "recieve" their words. It will be filtered. Just imagine that you are "recieving" and processing, understanding, thinking about, all the conversations around at the same time. And imagine that you're having the same overwhelming flow of informations from your eyes, nose, skin, etc ...

Well this is not the only thing involved in the autistic way of life, and again, it can be so different from one person to another. It seems also obvious that this specific caracteristic of low filtering must be distributed as a gradient in the population.
But my point is : when a child is born with a lower filter than average, it means that he will get used to process a lot of informations, consciously. He will do it everyday, non-stop. And I think that might participate to an explanation of why persons with autism have special abilities in coding (and not only).

Answer 2

@Jan
it was SAP in America. In Germany the company Auticon is leader.

Answer 3

they seem to be genius debugger

Answer 4

I remember a report about autists searching for old infrastructure in the ground of big cities. Just looking on the map they can predict old channels that don't apear in the land register.

Answer 5

I don't see any evidence for *all* people in the autism spectrum to have special abilities. Also, a friend of mine is on the spectrum and he's been out of the working class for a few years now, specifically because he couldn't be on the same page with the employers and his colleagues. Plus he's still in the process of recovering from burnout because he went above and beyond to try to fit in but that took a serious toll on him and now he's out of the picture, feeling hopeless of ever going back.

I keep encouraging him, he keeps telling me it's hopeless... it hurts my brains. He feels way too disconnected from the neurotypical people to have a chance of getting back in the game. I would speculate that his case is not unique, so it looks rather complicated.

As for ChillPill 's take, I don't see how all the people on the spectrum can be extraordinary. Sure they're different than the neurotypical ones, but they're still people. Some are indeed remarkable, some aren't, just like with "regular" people.

Answer 6

https://code.sololearn.com/W08qWtdybvre/?ref=app