Just wanted to share a bit of a bright point from last week, especially since I know The Workplace is a gauntlet of horrors designed to punish a lot of us neurodivergent people.

I’ve always got really great feedback on my communication skills. It’s one part writing-as-a-hobby, one part devops drive for operational efficiency, and three parts AuDHD. In particular I’m really good at communicating technical topics in ways that engineers are receptive to and that non-technical people can understand. Since my entire workplace is remote, efficient and comprehensible written communication is really important.

About a month ago I got looped into an initiative to add explicit guidelines about how to communicate effectively while remote. I was just asked to give feedback on how the guidelines sounded — and I realized that they were all modeled after how I specifically communicate. I even asked my boss about it and she confirmed that it was “heavily inspired” by my communication style. The best parts: I didn’t really have to do much work for this initiative, and I’ve been openly AuDHD at work for a year at this point, so they’re quite aware.

They literally just want everyone to make their communication more autistic, and they’re documenting that explicitly.

Unironic DEI win sicko-fem

  • crime [she/her, any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    21·
    2 months ago

    If you’re curious, the typical structure of my messages is like:

    Kind of communication: TL;DR of communication

    For context:

    • What I’m looking at
    • Why I’m looking at it
    • Some extra background

    So like “Question: Are we using foobar feature on purpose? Is it okay if I turn it off? For context, I want to do something kind of unrelated. The use of foobar isn’t blocking, but it will make what I want to do more expensive. Based on the commit history, it was introduced 10 years ago to support something we’re no longer using.”

    There’s other stuff too, like making sure people have all of the info they need to reply to me without extra clarifying back-and-forths when possible, or making sure it’s explicitly stated when we need to take action or look into something as a follow-up to whatever we’re talking about, or summarizing long threads for people who aren’t following them. That sort of thing.

  • arcane potato (she/they)@vegantheoryclub.orgEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Hell yeah! I love this for you and for the ND community in general 💖

    I’m externally successful, likely due to masking myself into an early grave but throughout my career I have been praised for my emotional intelligence (???) and self awareness (!!!) and how that helps me manage people well (!!!)1

    I am an engineer and I work in an extremely niche field that there aren’t a lot of experts in. My ability to get things done is 100% tied to my ability to translate engineer into trades person and vice versa. I’m not translating myself, although I do that too - but it’s mostly making sure the trades people understand what is being proposed by outside consultants so that they can provide their valuable comments and bringing those back as actionable items. I’m really good at figuring out if people are sharing anecdotes or facts, and if facts then getting the context around them. I am pathologically stubborn and finally have the authority to stop projects until my (our) concerns are addressed. Because the trades know I will go to bat for them, I have their trust and we do great things together.

    People are so busy not looking at the details and not listening that it’s a wonder buildings don’t topple over more LMAO (not that kind of engineer).

    1 I absolutely hate managing people, I’m slowly job crafting, as the young kids, say so that I don’t have to anymore lol.

    • crime [she/her, any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Thank you stalin-heart and ty for sharing your experiences too, I’m right there with you on managing people — managing myself feels hard enough lol, managing a team was hell.