I want to understand about autistic adults difficulties which they face in workplace.

I have just been through yet another terrible experience at work which has lost  me my job, and probably my whole career this time. I think it can be boiled down to this: whereas everyone needs to have people "on their side" in anything they do in order to succeed, neurotypicals tend not to be on the side of a person on the spectrum. It's like running a race having to wade through deep thick mud, when everyone else gets to run on dry ground. You have no chance of winning unless you are a really really fast runner.

Even though I am more capable and more intelligent than just about everyone around me, I never get any credit for my work and effort, more is expected of me (in terms of working hours and tasks), I get criticised for things I do that would be overlooked if anyone else did them, and, even worse than all that,  I have even been openly sabotaged by certain of my colleagues and my employer refused to take any action. I was treated about the same both before and after my disclosure, so it's not about whether people consciously know about the autism.

It all boils down to cognitive bias. I know that autism is supposed to be a disorder or a disability, but many people on the spectrum are actually far more intelligent than their neurotypical peers, and also have a better work ethic. Moreover, people on the spectrum are not nearly as susceptible to cognitive bias as neurotypicals.

A neurotypical forms an opinion and then their whole perception is altered based on the strength of that opinion. If they don't like someone (for example, if they have heard from another person that the person is weird or unfriendly), all they will see is that person's negative points, and they will disregard anything good about that person as some sort of aberration. That is all to protect their point of view, to reassure them that they were "in the right" all along. That is called "selective perception".

A very closely related cognitive bias is "confirmation bias", in which any evidence they receive from their senses confirming their own preconceptions is given much more weight than is evidence that would tend to disprove their preconceptions.

The really annoying thing is that neurotypicals don't even know they are subject to cognitive bias. After all, to realise that their own perception could be anything other than perfect would damage their fragile little egos that are telling them they are perfect and can't possibly make a mistake about someone else.

If the majority of people had an autistic type brain, that which is less susceptible to cognitive bias, more capable of making decisions based on logic rather than emotion, and generally more efficient overall, then the people who are called "neurotypicals" at present would be the ones who are considered deficient or disabled.

However, that isn't the world we live in. We have to put up with distracting noise and annoying fluorescent lights because they don't really bother anyone else. We have to work with people whose primitive minds reject us as different on the subconscious level and will not even give us a chance to prove ourselves, much less succeed. We are considered dishonest because we don't like making eye contact, even though we are much more honest, on average, than most people. Our lives are made difficult by little people with little minds who cannot bear for anyone else to prove them foolish or anything less than the alpha dog. People find us annoying because we just want to do our work and don't want to waste our time exchanging mindless banter in coffee breaks. I guess they can't stand the feelings of rejection because we aren't falling all over ourselves to socially ingratiate ourselves to them.

Well, guess, what, neurotypicals, the slight feeling of rejection you get when one of us isn't as quick to give eye contact as you think we should be isn't anything compared to how we feel when you shun, exclude, and outright bully us. Is it really surprising that we are shy about socialising with you when you treat us that way?

Thanks for the nice post, NAS24456, and sorry to hear about the terrible experience. I'm guessing from what you say that you think that your most recent job won't give you a good reference. If you are willing, maybe a bit more detail would help us and the original poster understand what happened, and what form the exclusion and bullying took. Is it something workplace training of managers and typical colleagues could have helped with?

I'd agree autistic people are often more intelligent than the people around them, and this can be part of the communication difficulties. I sometimes want to put quite a complex argument, throwing in a lot of incidental detail, but people only listen to a part of it. Also agree that autistic people can be more conscientious, and fail to get deserved credit, possibly because they're more modest, or don't use typicals' ways of claiming success. Do you defend yourself against the criticism? How do you think it would be if you had more autistic colleagues?

I wouldn't necessarily agree about being relatively immune to cognitive bias or confirmation bias. Such things can still come to bite one, which is why I like to triple-check everything before making a firm statement. For example, what evidence is there against your account of a general underlying bias in your post?

There's an old Dilbert cartoon where a character listening to a presentation says something like 'there's no point in this - either you're telling me what I already know, or you're wrong'. It's still de rigeur to listen to other points of view and try to take them seriously, trying to work out any difference of fundamental assumptions.  I said above that I could pass at banter (and nowadays even eye contact), and it doesn't feel like it's about ingratiation - maybe we can see mutual strokes and compliments as not just social lubricant, but a work motivator and feedback according to our own values, whereby everyone can achieve their best potential. Maybe that's unrealistic, but it's deliberately an aspiration.

Thanks for the nice post, NAS24456, and sorry to hear about the terrible experience. I'm guessing from what you say that you think that your most recent job won't give you a good reference. If you are willing, maybe a bit more detail would help us and the original poster understand what happened, and what form the exclusion and bullying took. Is it something workplace training of managers and typical colleagues could have helped with?

I'd agree autistic people are often more intelligent than the people around them, and this can be part of the communication difficulties. I sometimes want to put quite a complex argument, throwing in a lot of incidental detail, but people only listen to a part of it. Also agree that autistic people can be more conscientious, and fail to get deserved credit, possibly because they're more modest, or don't use typicals' ways of claiming success. Do you defend yourself against the criticism? How do you think it would be if you had more autistic colleagues?

I wouldn't necessarily agree about being relatively immune to cognitive bias or confirmation bias. Such things can still come to bite one, which is why I like to triple-check everything before making a firm statement. For example, what evidence is there against your account of a general underlying bias in your post?

There's an old Dilbert cartoon where a character listening to a presentation says something like 'there's no point in this - either you're telling me what I already know, or you're wrong'. It's still de rigeur to listen to other points of view and try to take them seriously, trying to work out any difference of fundamental assumptions.  I said above that I could pass at banter (and nowadays even eye contact), and it doesn't feel like it's about ingratiation - maybe we can see mutual strokes and compliments as not just social lubricant, but a work motivator and feedback according to our own values, whereby everyone can achieve their best potential. Maybe that's unrealistic, but it's deliberately an aspiration.

Tried the grievance procedure. The employer didn't do anything. They were especially worried about admitting that I actually had a disability which would make what the others did to me harassment, so the determination was that there was no evidence for anything I claimed, again because they didn't want to have to admit there was any wrongdoing which would make them liable in the tribunal.

Tried a trade union rep. Got a bit of help at the beginning and then they abandoned me because I had joined too late. They decided that I should accept the insulting offer that the employer made to me and that if I didn't, they wouldn't offer me any more help. It was the trade union rep's observation upon first meeting me that led me to get the diagnosis in the first place.

I had disclosed several symptoms I was having, which corresponded very closely with Aspergers symptoms. It was after that disclosure that my colleagues were sending around emails making fun of my interpersonal skills, something I specifically said I was having trouble with. Even without having told them about the Aspergers specifically, surely a symptom someone discloses as part of an illness they were having, whether it corresponds to a disability or not, is off-limits as far as ridicule among colleagues is concerned? My Line Manager had no business telling everyone about my illness in the first place.

Thanks for fleshing out the story. It sounds like a toxic environment. Maybe your line manager and colleague were afraid of your ability, and now you're gone will have to find someone else to pick on.

As I understand it, bullying is not 'perfectly OK'  in the UK. It should be covered under a grievance procedure. It's definitely something an employment tribunal would look at, and if it's also part of a pattern of discrimination against someone with a disability, that must be worth something. I've seen that having a trade union rep can make a world of difference.

I can relate to working into the night to get things done. Odd that the 'reasonable adjustment' boils down to 'be reasonable'.

I'm not one of the people who would usually have needed any more reasonable adjustment than simply being treated like everyone else, but, unfortunately, that didn't happen, even when I begged to not be given so much more than everyone else to do because I had to work into the middle of the night just to get done everything I needed to do.

Everything I did, even when I did everything right, would be picked apart. I did everything everyone asked me to do, but my Line Manager set me up for failure. She would tell me to wait to do a task until we had a meeting about it, but then at the meeting, she would ask very pointedly whether I had done the exact thing she had specifically told me to wait to do, and humilate me in front of my colleagues because I hadn't done it yet. She would also base a given performance evaluation on something she hadn't even told me in advance would be expected of me. This would be something she didn't ever do to my colleagues in the same position.

I worked in an educational institution and of course student feedback is very important to evaluate job performance. One of my colleagues was always ridiculing me behind my back in front of the students. He told them I was "useless" even though my knowledge and skill far outmatched his own. The only reason the students liked him so much is that he was too lazy to give them homework, so they got away with doing no work and consequently gave him good feedback. He is even seen on a video recording making scathing jokes about me to a room full of students.

Of course, as a result of my colleague's behaviour, the students complained about me, cast aspersions on my knowledge, and repeated on their feedback forms that they were told I am useless, and that caused me to lose my job. Even with all the evidence against him, the colleague who did this is still working there and I am unable to even function because of what he and my Line Manager did to me.

That same colleague also took credit for my work. He tricked me into sending him info documents that I had given to my students, then he apparently claimed that he had prepared the documents and that I had got them from him. Of course my Line Manager believed him and didn't care what I had to say in my own defense. She also didn't care that he would often just take off travelling for days at a time, even when he was supposed to be teaching. That left me to cover the work that he should have done, and I was accused of being "disorganised" because I was often having to scramble at the last minute.

My Line Manager always made such a big deal of the fact that the students found me "unapproachable" but that was only from students supervised by my colleague. He had apparently told them that I would shout at them if they approached me. Nothing the other students (the ones not suervised by that colleague) had to say made any difference because a small number of his students had been coached into making horrible complaints about pretty much every aspect of my being, even personal stuff. The group of students supervised by my colleague gave me ratings 50 points (out of 100) lower than the other students gave me, but nobody cared. I was told that the negative, personal, and offensive student comments would be taken very seriously, and it didn't matter that the students themselves had been influenced. I finally just had it and got out of there because I couldn't take the undeserved criticism any longer.

It was pure bullying, but, of course, bullying is perfectly ok according to the law in the UK, so I now have to prove that I had a disability in order to get any justice for what I suffered.

Could training have prevented my situation? Perhaps, but not if they were determined to give me a hard time, which it seemed they were. Even more helpful would be not to employ sociopaths and bullies in an educational setting, or at least don't allow them to rise into positions of authority and to DO SOMETHING when someone is bullied or harassed at work.

Those people got off on how badly they were treating me and how I was having more and more difficulty coping. After all, I had nobody other than my Line Manager whom I could approach when I had difficulty, and when I did, she pretended to care, but then took note of everything I said and then used it against me in my performance evaluations.

I am so glad I started recording my meeings with her. I would recommend that anyone having difficulty at work to get yourself a free app for recording sounds and use it discreetly on your phone. Otherwise, nobody will believe anything you say.