What I want to be when I grow up

Almost five decades in, I think I finally figured out what I want to do with my life. But rather than speculating early in life, I had to experiment, succeed, and more importantly fail in order to earn these insights.

When I was in high school, I wasn't giving much thought to my future beyond basic survival. I grew up in a dysfunctional home. I was abused. And I was, at the time, not yet diagnosed with Autism. But I knew I was very different somehow, and so did my peers. When they went off to college, I bounced around with a number of low wage jobs. One of the things I learned early on was that I could not make a career out of working with my body. I had to find a different vocation.

Tech was omnipresent in my life. I learned the LOGO programming language before starting Kindergarten just so I could program a homebrew robot built by the groundskeeper at my summer camp. Later, I'd helped my uncle to build an program a Heathkit HERO1 robot. I had an Apple IIe computer that I enjoyed programming. And I ran a Bulletin Board System. It seemed a foregone conclusion that I should work in tech. And once I got my foot in the door, I did pretty well for myself.

I'd had a couple of false starts with working as a manager. The responsibility fell on me a few times just because I was the most senior engineer and there was a vacuum to fill. I got pushed into it by default. But I wasn't good at it, didn't enjoy it, and I'm betting the people who worked for me didn't, either.

It was some time after this that I'd learn that I am Autistic. And this helped me to understand myself much better. It also helped me to understand the challenges I had always had in connecting with other people.

Much later in my career I'd had a more cultivated experience transitioning from engineering to management. I had the benefit of an experienced CTO mentoring me, challenging me, helping me to understand that this was going to take a very different skillset and was not remotely the same as working as an engineer.

This time I rather enjoyed it. The experiences of being a leader stuck with me as fond memories far more than anything I'd built myself as a technologist. Helping people to be their best selves, helping teams to realize their potential, to build better products, was something I'd come to really enjoy.

But while I was really enjoying the opportunity to create safe spaces for others to feel a sense of belonging and to be safe to do the best work of their lives, I was still (and to this day still feel) that people like me don't belong in most workplaces. While a lot of work has been done to create safety, inclusion, equity for people of all different colors, gender identities, LGBTQ+ identities, there is still a huge gap in cultivating safety and equity for disabled folks and, in my experience, particularly for people with very different ways of thinking. Enter neurodiversity.

Even the most radically inclusive workplaces, it turns out, may unintentionally exclude people for having different types of brains than most people. Imagine being excited to start a new job, hearing HR folks during an onboarding session get all of your new coworkers worked up in sense of antipathy against those who speak very directly while not conveying a sense of personal care to others.

If you've spent much time with Autistic people, you might think that this style of communication is very common to us. And it's one of those things that makes it hard to connect with non-Autistic people. So while everyone in the onboarding session is taking turns sharing negative adjectives to describe the very nature of Autistic candor, any Autistic people in the room might be made to feel like they are not welcome in this culture.

So to know my path forward, I have to reflect on the beaten trail behind me. What part of this delighted me? What parts traumatized me? What do I want to do differently?

What has delighted me?

• Helping people to get re-engaged in their careers during a downturn.
• Helping misunderstood or marginalized people to build their brand and be more valued by the people around them.
• Liberating the latent potential of unloved teams.
• Developing leaders where no one was looking.
• Driving organizational transformation, helping the whole organization to see and embrace its latent potential.

You'll notice I didn't say anything about tech there. Tech is how I got to where I am at, and it can be part of where I'm going. But it doesn't have to be. I am a leader. And while I lead technologists, I've not been a hands-on technologist in years. I often find myself leading teams that are building tech that is outside of my own experience and understanding. And I do fine. So I'm open-minded, even curious, about leading in non-technology spaces.

What traumatized me?

• Non-neuroinclusive hiring processes. People like me may be disadvantaged in challenge-response type interviews. We may have to work 10x as hard to hit the baseline social expectations of an interview (strong eye contact, good handshake, etc). It turns out most job interviews do a better job of selecting for people who are good at interviews, and not so much for selecting people who can add to the team.
• Discriminatory performance reviews. My social style is, by nature, Autistic. So every year I get these amazing performance reviews that celebrate my substantial contributions to the organization, but always single out how my social behaviors make some coworkers feel uneasy by virtue of being "cold" or "prickly".
• Not being taken seriously for bigger roles because I'm too Autistic. Even though I've shown a tremendous capacity to lead, I know that I'm sometimes overlooked for bigger roles because I don't play the political game like non-Autistic leaders do. I see this as a strength, as a culture add. But differences aren't often seen that way.
• Not having my need for adjustments taken seriously. I may look abled, but I am disabled. Would you judge someone in a wheelchair by their ability to climb stairs? Why judge a neurominority by their ability to behave like a neurotypical person? While I can, if I need to, "mask" as neurotypical and play the part for short periods, I learn and share information very differently from my neurotypical peers. If you try to powerpoint at me, I will not be able to focus for long. If you want me to powerpoint at you or at a larger audience, I have to work a lot harder to convey information in a format that I can't receive in well myself. I need a little bit of routine in my day. It's really mandatory that I get that lunch break every day. And if it's not an emergency, I need to step away from work at a reasonable hour every day.

What do I want to do differently?

• I want to work for a company that very intentionally makes room to treat people with different brains as equally valuable employees.
• I want to develop cultures with several concentric rings. Moving from outside-in:

1. Radical inclusion.
2. Disability inclusion.
3. Neurodiversity.
4. Autistic inclusion.

• That is to say, I have the most passion around Autistic inclusion and Neurodiversity, because that's my lived experience where I can lead from a place of representation in those communities (something so often missing from the Neurodiversity conversation). And I want to take the learnings and innovations from this space to elevate opportunities for the rest of the disabled community. And take the learnings and innovations from that and create a more universal radically inclusive workplace culture.
• Whether or not my future is in tech is not a major factor.

What do I want to do the same?

• I'm a leader. I can't not lead. I enjoy leading and wish to continue on that track.
• I work hard to take agency over my calendar, to decline non-productive, non-valuable investments of my time. To focus my energy on where I can make the most difference. Meetings about meetings aren't very interesting. Working sessions to make progress together on a shared challenge are way more compelling. Strategy sessions are compelling. Spending time with the people I lead helping them to be more effective is much more compelling than spending time doing status readouts to leaders above me (could this be an email?). So in whatever I do, I need to have some shared understanding that I'm really effective at what I do, but only if I have room to do it. And I'll only have room to do it if I can be pretty frugal about accepting meeting invitations.

Where can I do this?

• If I have to, I'll start the company I want to work for in partnership with similarly-minded people.
• If I can, I'll join that leadership team if it already exists.
• I put a big dent in this at a Fortune 5 company that had mixed support for this sort of change. I think I could put a bigger dent in this with a big organization that has an executive leadership team unified behind these outcomes.

What do I value that drives this?

• Humanity's evolutionary advantage over the animal kingdom is the brain. Nature has given us a variety of neurotypes. We are at our best together as a species when we play to the strengths of all of these neurotypes, rather than forcing neurominorities to perform to neurotypical expectations.
• All people are born with equal inherent value.
• Diversity of thinking leads to a broader array of ideas offered to address any given challenge. In an effective team dynamic, this will result in consistently better ideas being executed consistently more successfully.
• Diversity of thinking leads to resilience against unforeseen crises. It will also lead to foreseeing and potentially mitigating more of these crises before they can emerge.
• Diversity of thinking offers a competitive advantage against competitors and rivals who do not effectively value this.
• Diversity of thinking is not just for the individual contributors. It works best when omnipresent up into the C suite and Board of Directors.
• We live in a capitalist society. Until something better emerges, there is nothing wrong with making money. I want to see Neurodivergent people have better opportunities to enjoy this kind of success. Which can only come if the organizations they work for are successful.

Bottom line:

• I want to change the world. I want to create better opportunities for people who are unintentionally excluded, trying to play a game that was optimized for one group of people to win while unintentionally excluding others. And I want to enjoy success with others who feel similarly.

OK, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. But now I have a much better sense of what I want to do.