I'm Uncomfortable with you: you're fired.

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Take for example the case of Ward Churchill. He's the guy that said that everyone that died at the World Trade Center deserved it because they were "little Eichmann's" (a Nazi war criminal), because they supposedly were part of the whole American military-industrial complex (when in fact they were just office workers...).

Ward was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He'd gotten the job partly because he'd advertised himself as being of American Indian ancestry, although later it appeared he had no Indian ancestry whatsoever. A substantial percentage of his body of 'scholarly work' also appeared to be pure plagiarism. The University began a peer review of his work that lasted almost two years, ultimately leading to his firing. No small thing.

My point: despite the fact he'd made himself hugely unpopular with his 9/11 comments, and despite the fact his academic misdeeds were pretty much open-&-shut, he still got the exhaustive peer review the system requires.

WOW! Being from the UK where it's actually pretty difficult to fire someone I find that simply astounding. I had no idea it was so easy to lose your job in the US. That is brutal and I think I personally would have spent most of my working life jobless if that had been the case.

As others have noted, the higher level jobs don't have as big an issue. I worked in Silicon Valley for many years, and nobody even noticed. I was only slightly more quirky than other engineers.

Personally, I've found it a lot more comfortable to work for small companies, where the owners are doing some of the work themselves.

Yeah, Temple Grandin once wrote that an ASD person needs to be exceptionally good at their job to balance out a lack of social skills.

It's difficult to fire people who belong to unions, too. It's one of the reasons my Dad hates working in places with unions, because it's almost impossible for the company to fire deadbeat workers because of the union.