media celebrating economic exploitation of autistics

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I was paid $18.75 an hour at my last job. My job title was "Legal Secretary."

For context: My dad was (and still is) a private attorney on contact with the company, and he has ties at the executive level. He got me the job.

At the time that I got myself fired (by refusing to take any more s**t. ) I was assigned to keeping track of over two million dollars ($2,000,000) worth of liability (money we would have to pay if I missed deadlines), was expected to make independent decisions in interactions with government agents within the court system, was expected to keep track of deadlines for between about 40 and 55 case files a month and to have knowledge of what would be due for the next month. I had to organize everything myself. I had to make all of the physical files and do all of the paperwork for every case assigned to me. I had to babysit employees in a related department of the company to give me documents that I couldn't do my work without.

Let me repeat that they paid me $18.75 an hour. I worked full time at 40 hours a week.

Now let me tell you that I had to DEMAND that I be paid SO much; my "supervisor" (also the executive who hired me, and also the one who fired me) thought $16.75 an hour would be fair. I got to negotiate my 3-month raise by email because my "supervisor" was never around to meet in person; he was usually not even in the building. I got lucky!

If I had not gotten lucky and been able to demand a higher pay, I would still be living with family today, because I would not be able to afford all the expenses of moving out and living alone.

The men in charge of that company systematically take advantage of ALL their employees, and they just fire anyone who doesn't take it.

I'm told this is just how business is done in the USA these days, and from what I've seen, I definitely believe it.

Edit: I should clarify that I was hired during a time of company growth; at the beginning, I was only dealing with about $600,000 in liability. I got no compensation as my job got harder and harder by month. They hired three new employees in my department in the last year I was with the company, doubling the department's size, but my personal work load still kept growing.

Last edited by AmethystRose on 26 Aug 2014, 10:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.

i think that if they where normal they would be paid a lot more for the same f*****g work. id say thats explotiation pure and simple. i think that its just not f*****g fair and theres nothing more to it then that. its essentally desighned to exploit a specific group of people and its impossible not to think of that as discrimination.

This is why people on the spectrum should prioritize the development of new corporations. Through the formation of 'guilds' that offer guaranteed living standards and a cut of the profits in exchange for putting in regular work, would be an ideal situation for us to advance out of the economic ruts we're currently in. Just go back to the guild system of the middle ages: Do you think people got those jobs by being fast talkers? Nope. They got in by having a focus on the job, and showing they were willing to put up with more to get in.

The abolition of the guild system is likely what did us in: We can bring it back.

One of the most important things to shake off the myth that we are incapable of collaboration, we simply prefer modes of collaboration that are at odds with typical cultural norms.

The results of this poll on autism and anarchism http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt267435.html indicate that 50% of us prefer completely non-hierarchical forms of organisation, and from the comments it seems that quite a few amongst the other 50% would also prefer a non-hierarchical form of organisation, but believe that some form of hierarchy is essential for scaling up organisational structures.

What I believe we need to construct are organisations that:

1. Are free of hierarchies internally
2. Have an external interface consisting of less-autistic or non-autistic "friends of anarchism", with many years of business experience in the mainstream economy, to ensure that we are not economically exploited

Can you say more about an autistic person collaborating with other person(s) of any brain type?
I find that I am not good at collaborating, because it seems to work like just let me do the project, the other person is not needed.

Did you read the entire article or just stop because you were "disgusted" and made the assumption that the people who did the startup were awful and NT and therefore out to exploit others?

Some things that factor into paying the current employees, and some other things that are important about the startup- WHICH BEGAN TWO YEARS AGO:
[all of this is taken from the article you linked to]

It specifically aims to accomodate employees on the spectrum.
-so not only do they seek out those on the spectrum, they offer part time hours to accomodate those who want those hours. They also take into account how best individuals can communicate- even at the interview level and understand that a lot of these individuals have had difficulties finding employment. In doing do, they are also willing to disregard resumes to some extent and seek other forms of proof of ability.

The company has already paid dividends for the employees on its team.
-This, despite the fact that they are part-time employees. BUT OH YEAH THEY ARE EXPLOITING THEM and taking advantage and what a cruel heartless thing to do.

Though Ultra Testing uses specially trained project managers to help clients and testers communicate with one another, the process has not been without its issues.
-Though you probably have to do your own investigating, other parts of the article- which discuss issues with unexpected scheduling issues and other events creating anxiety- indicate these project managers are trained in knowledge about what difficulties come along with being on the spectrum and how it affects functioning. The company as a whole seems very accomodating. Sorry, does your small business have that cost?

By the end of July, Anandan hopes to transition Leslie and one other tester into full-time salaried employees.
-What they are doing now is NOT the end. So I will bring you back to the title of the article: Two MIT Grads Founded A Startup That Almost Exclusively Employs People On The Autism Spectrum If you own a business, you understand that growth does not happen overnight and you don't have what you picture right out of the gate.

Not everyone is out to get you. I swear.

...and they would have gotten the job in some other way if that were the case.

If you have a talent someone is going to exploit you and you are going to exploit their desire to use that talent. [And that is called negotiation, and why there is a pay RANGE and not a specific number that everyone is paid at that company, or any company]

Life is not f*****g fair. No one should have ever given you the impression it would be and shame on them a thousand fold if they did. Five year olds have a problem with that and go on to whine about it and use it as an excuse. I get the whole neurological issue with rules which translates into justice and fairness and I have it too. It's hard to deal with. But life sucks and people suck.
Use it as something to fuel you if necessary but get the f**k over it or it will forever drag you down.
And no one wants to hear someone go on about how life isn't fair. No one will listen.
Because everyone knows it.

This is a good question. I have thought a lot about differences in learning styles even before I knew anything about AS.

As early as I can remember I have always come up with idiosyncratic ways of doing things, and often my solutions are simpler in the sense of taking less time, involve a less complex design, or fewer steps and symbols in the context of formal mathematics and software. At the same time I noticed that most people have a very high resistance to change, i.e. they only adopt an "innovative" approach if it is already practiced by many of the people around them. From my perspective I was frustrated by how uncooperative most people are. They don't help you with developing a radically new approach.

Typical learning is highly social. New techniques entering typical human cultures mostly come the form of minor adjustments. These are then copied socially. I think it is false to assume that autistics don't learn socially, they rather seem to have a resistance to social learning not unlike the resistance that typical people have with respect to the integration of radically new ideas into their culture.

I can only speak for myself and from the experiences that I have had, interacting with hundreds of people in the context of the conception, design, and development of new software intensive services and products in more than one hundred organisations (I often work as an external advisor).

My learning style is highly autodidactic. I am open to entertaining established ways of doing things, but only after conducting some first hand experiments, and after tinkering along the edges, to see whether any so-called best practice is indeed close to the optimal way of doing things. Often I either end up with a non-negligible improvement over established practice, or I discover that one of the radically different approaches in my mental tool kit is vastly superior ? and I run with the overall optimum approach.

My autodidactic/autistic learning style is not completely unsocial, but it easily conflicts with social status/power hierarchies that are grounded in the socially accepted way of doing things. I probably have much less patience with "socialising" improvements than typical people. I enjoy working with experienced scientists and engineers who are similarly unencumbered by the level of social acceptance around them. Collaboration with such people involves recognising and trusting their individually unique insights and levels of expertise in specific domains.



Once a sub-project has been identified that matches your specific expertise and one of your special interests, you should be given the opportunity to run with it, without unnecessary interference. You probably have the expectation that people should entrust you with all aspects of the implementation. That's great, exactly how it should be. This is something that typical people have great difficulty with. They do not extend much trust to people who think differently and who come from a different background. Instead, typical people put in place command and control hierarchies to put a lid on the level of creativity that is deemed acceptable in the wider cultural context from their perspective.

Only some level of face to face interaction between experts is required. Asynchronous collaboration is the default mode in open source communities and in many Web-era technology companies. Actually WP is a good example. Consider the amount and the quality of first-hand knowledge about autism that is shared on this site. We help and assist each other a lot, even if we all have a unique individual perspective. It's worthwhile to remind ourselves of this every now and then.

Independent validation and feedback is a very important aspect of collaboration. Autistics are great at formulating direct feedback that gets to the point, with no sugar-coating, and many are also very open to incorporating improvements suggested by others, as long as the changes are real improvements. Typical people often only provide what I call self-serving social feedback, i.e. comments that are designed to show of the [superior] competence of the commentator, but that actually do not contribute anything of substance to the problem and solution at hand.

I love to work in a cross-disciplinary context, and have become very experienced in scoping out module boundaries and formal interfaces between different disciplines and sub-domains. Typical managers complain about herding cats. I don't have that problem. The problem goes away as soon as you start to move away from a command and control structure to a fluid networked form of collaboration, and as soon as trust and domain expertise are instituted as top level values.

Instead of going into further details in a single post, here are some excellent books that touch on collaboration from different angles, each with unique insights:

- Why we cooperate http://www.amazon.com/Why-Cooperate-Bos ... B0058OUGXE
- Reinventing discovery http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Disco ... B005OQGZ54
- Managing flow: A process theory of the knowledge-based firm http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Flow-Pro ... 0230553761

The latter book provides a number of concrete examples of collaborative organisational cultures.