Aspies in Empleyment

Post Reply New Topic

According to this statistics 12% of aspies are in fulltime employment. s**t this is bad, much worse then I thought. I thought that as an aspie, I should have been raking in the big bucks as a systems architect/developer or something. According to this statistics I am quote a success 

http://www.autismstatistics.org/index.p ... employment

Look on the bright side... Asperger's went into the DSM in 1995 so safe to say most folks with this diagnosis are too young to get work permits - in the usa at least.

kinda brings down the employed average...

Well I'm in fulltime employment, there are probably others as well who have aspergers but don't realise it or dont bother filling in surveys (after all they are too busy working)

I'm in full-time employment, and have been for over twenty-five years.

I'm now looking to see if I can give up on that, and go part-time, so I can have more energy for hobbies and other interests. Life, basically.

Since I'm not hooked on conventional material acquisition (I have an ancient car, no designer clothes, no bling (well, one ring)) I'm waking up to the fact that a full-time job may not be serving my best interests.

The Aspie diagnosis a bit over a year ago fed into this. It made me review what I was doing because it was what I wanted, and what I was doing merely because it was conventional, or in an effort to fit in.

looks like im gonna be working two part time jobs pretty soon. hopefully the next step after that will be finally moving out on my own!

I'm not a traditional full-time employee either, but I don't think I fit the survey. With my job, I could pick up additional work here and there to bring me up to full-time year-round, but I don't need to. My hours are about 20-30 a week for most of the year, and it swings up to 40+ in the winter season. (From mid November to about February, I'm BUSY.) The thing is, I'm very well paid for what I do, so I don't have to work 40 hours all year-round. I could do it, but I have a enough $$$$ to do what I need to do, and enough of a pillow in the bank that I can have a minor emergency. Any other major expenditures, I just grab a few smaller jobs in advance and get the extra cash.

That being said, I didn't do well in corporate America. I worked in an airline call center and felt like I was living with my skin off. This was tolerable when I had the best supervisor ever. S (not gonna use her real name) was the type of supervisor who if you needed a boss to ride your butt to get stuff done, she'd transfer you out to a new team at the first oppurtunity. But if you were the type who did well with little supervision, she'd back off. I only ever saw her for monthly call moniterings and paperwork issues. She was great! I had like, 2 good friends I hung with who were also anti-social for different reasons, which was why we always bid graveyard. You'd see the rest of the graveyard peeps crammed into two and a half bays, because the building was so creepy at night, and then the three of us, off by ourselves. But anyway, my supervisor also had the least bit of seniority, so after september 11, she was given the choice to take a nice severance or wait to be laid off when things got really bad, and I got transferred into a team with a control freak for a supervisor who had no empathy whatsoever. I never said to any of them, I have asperger's so you gotta be nice, I just said, that I was very independant and worked well that way. I wasn't the only one who didn't like her, and it had nothing to do with Asperger's (in fact, I later found out she has it too.). She just needed to be in control of everything and she couldn't handle people who didn't need that sort of supervision. I left, and then she got fired. Part of the reason she got fired was because she got 24 people of S's team when S left, and 19 of us eventually resigned when we couldn't get moved to a different team.

But anyway, I suspect that even if I did not have AS, I wouldn't have successful as a Dilbert. AS does affect my employability and job performance though. One of the problems I had was that I'm noise sensitive, and some days are bad enough that I can't leave the house. I just plan accordingly. Since my job is on a two week or four week cycle, (depends on the client) I get as much done as I can during the first week because that way, I can crash if I need to. I've only had one week in the past 18 months (as long as I've been merchandising) when I was bad enough to not be able to work at all. Up until 18 months ago, I did manage full time most of the time since I was old enough to work full time. Labor laws in my area didn't allow me to work more than 30 hours a week until I was 18. So between 16
and 18, I was as full time as I was allowed to be.

On social security here. I think that at least in Norway, students with Asperger's usually end up in the same job-training programs as teens with more severe learning problems.

Im self-employed with my own accountant, not that i ever speak to him as that means using the phone...yeeshk!! !!

I am going to be in employment, and I am looking forward to it.

I'm un-/self-diagnosed, and full-time employed at university. Which is ideal. I can pretty much make my own office hours, read and research what I find interesting, some teaching to do - but I rather like teaching (provided I like the subject). Universities are havens for more or less eccentric people.

My forays into other work were usually short and unsuccessful. I was fired twice as a cleaner (part-time job while studying): I was too meticulous with cleaning one office and ended up having no time left to take a look at the other thirty-three offices.

Job interviews were a problem. "You know, you're a very bright person and all, but to work at the Internet help desk, you'll need, er... social skills. Perhaps we'll have a job as programmer available in a while?"

One interview to work at a stationary store/print shop, I messed up by saying I have an affinity with paper. "What, you put it in your bed, eh? *chuckle*". Well, I do love paper. The texture of it, and the smell of it. Grew up in a town with paper mills, love the smell. Couldn't manage to explain myself, though.

So I'm resigned to being pretty much useless at anything but academic work. Which is fine by me.

Merlijn