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It's a fine line companies walk. They want to build a cohesive company identity with aligned values and goals, but they also want diversity, which makes all of that harder. So you have these "culture fit" interviews which are really just conformity checks. "Are you going to get on people's nerves?" is really what they want to see, and the right answer varies by environment. They're asking, "Are you one of us?" No surprise people on the spectrum struggle reading that and end up being either too honest or just too awkward.

"Be yourself" is terrible advice if you want to work at a startup and you're at all out of step with their culture and worldview. As one such person I have learned to mask whatever needs masking.


Cohesive company identity with aligned values and goals is not endangered by people with Asperger or whatever on position of coder or admin. The way more bigger threat to that goal is selection of people for management and leadership level. Who gets rewarded and why.

You can talk about cohesiveness and shared values till your face is blue, but if people lie, manipulate, intentionally misinform, are antagonistic in order to throw competition down, it wont happen no matter how autists were refused.

Like, we come back to social skills of developers topic every other month. But actual cohesiveness culture depends way more on middle management which tend to attract and select people who cause way more drama and ineffectivity then people with asperger.

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