Managment and promotion in orgonisations. Do autistic people miss out?

I don't know that I agree. What some people might call 'emotional empathy' others might call people pleasing. I knew one autistic girl who was supper social and popular, in general and at work. But at work she couldn't seem to say no and she was constantly burnt out.

And while she didn't seem to get into conflict with her team she often had to say no to other people in other departments or orgonisations which lead to lots of conflict. Just not with her team ... they were quite happy to have someone to hand the phone to who could tell the other end which bridge to go jump off of.

Fiona said:

I'm not sure, I've found the conflict is most often with people who work closely together who don't communicate well, don't share how they work best, and don't accommodate others. 'Rank' doesn't really come into it for me.

I guess it depends how vertical your orgonisation is. In my exprence most project are one man jobs (or have been broken down into one man sub jos) and most interaction is with your manager. That's the norm in most places I've worked.

yeah that's prity typical for the civil service. one person might manage 1-3 people who themselves might manage their own 'underlings.' But that's mixed project managment and line managment. frankly it sounds like your company has a better way of doing it.

Universities can end up with one PI (principal investigator) 'managing' 6 or more people but typically 3 of them are PhD students.

I am a software engineer, officially my title is "senior software engineer". This means I'm now at the level and experience to become what we call a technical lead on projects. I can manage my team at a technical level - I decide what the tasks are, maybe who does them and in what order.

There are other managers though who do different roles. Project managers handle project tracking and organising meetings. Account managers handle budgets and client relationships. And line managers handle each employee, such as how they are doing, booking annual leave and dealing with sick leave.

I work together with all of them. What you describe sounds similar to this, where I might be "managing" some things but they are only related to my speciality. I'm happy with this arrangement, I would not be very good at managing purely people since it would take me away from doing the things I like best.

Someone else said something about the number of people, I can handle around 2-3 people at once, but a larger team I would struggle with.

Peter said:

social dificulties is a diagnostic nessesity for autism

Yes - but this is different for each of us. I have difficulties in groups of 3 or more but am perfectly able to manage one employee at a time, or mediate an issue between two people (I did this with around 10 people once, but it was exhausting). Particularly because I experience emotional empathy rather than cognitive empathy. Part of my 'overwhelm' socially is that I feel what other people feel, so the more people in the group the more I get overwhelmed with the feelings and needs of the group, as I can't distinguish all the feelings, it is like a tsunami of feeling, in the same way I can't cope with multiple varied sounds at the same time. I am autistic, I met the criteria, just not in a stereotypical way, which often happens with women being misdiagnosed. So I'l agree to disagree with you on that paragraph.

Peter said:

most interpersonal issues at work are between people and their managers

I'm not sure, I've found the conflict is most often with people who work closely together who don't communicate well, don't share how they work best, and don't accommodate others. 'Rank' doesn't really come into it for me. I do think that sometimes managers get blamed a lot for the things 'the organisation' asks them to get the staff to do, and often they don't receive any training on how to manage when they get promoted. And some of that (appraisals or mandatory training) we just have to accept as part of our conditions of employment.

Peter said:

Sure maybe if all you do is finacial services you can operate with a small IT team and no other technical specialists but thats not true of prity much every other class of buisness. Certainly not of universities which have huge amounts of reaserch going on and employ a huge number of scientists.

The uni I worked at was focussed on teaching only, not research so there were few people working on products as such - most were teaching languages, business courses, economics courses etc and the focus from the IT side was to keep the classrooms working and the likes of the library.

It was no coincidence that the uni was doing terribly in its ranking amongst other unis in the UK.

Most teachers had multiple roles to keep them busy so we had some working in IT part time as well.

I've really not come across many companies making a product that requires technical specialists in my career though. Most outsource work overseas (for developers because it is so cheap) or are resellers if they are technical. Costs of labour and materials are just too high now to make it viable.

The civil service did have terrible salaries which makes them less attractive to work in. I was lucky as they paid me well to handle the merger of 2 organisations into 1 from an IT perspective.

What made that job difficult was the permanent staff who had been assigned roles in the migration project either resigned or said they wouldn't do it because it was so much work, so I had role after role passed to me to handle and I was daft enough to rise to the challenge.

That attitude of being unwilling to take on a difficult task seemed very typical of the people working there - everyone just wanted their little space, a set routine and nothing to challenge them. Maybe they were autists.

Iain said:

Companies in the UK that make physical things are in a minority now - most companies sell a service so you have loads of people involved in sales, marketing, research, standards, managing the product for clients, HR, accounting, management and a small number in IT to keep all these people doing their things.

I can't help but think most of the roles are not nessicery. Good products are their own best salesmen for instance. Research of course is super technical. So is legal complience with standards. Sure you need some of these people in suport roles but when you have more than are actuallly delivering your product (or service) the situation is insain.

Iain said:

I've worked in lots of Banks (no real product), a university, a property valuation system (not bought out by Rightmove so they had software as a service), the civil service (market regulation), a press monitoring company (creates daily reports on where their clients are covered in any form of press all the time, so data mining service I guess), and for a short time I worked for a company who made mainframes but this was all on the sales side so the product was never really of much relevance.

TBH banks are an exelent example of the kind of orgonisation I'd never advise an autistic person to join. The civil service is in fact eactly the kind of orgonisation I had in mind. A huge number of workers. There are statisitions, scientists, data scientists, operational reserchers. And they can't keep talented staff because there are no senior technical roles for them to be promoted into, just managerial ones. They outsource every hard technical project they get because they can't keep staff with the compitence level to handel them which as a vicious cycle makes it hard for them to keep compitent staff becase they farm out all interesting work. I know this because I used to work for them.

Sure maybe if all you do is finacial services you can operate with a small IT team and no other technical specialists but thats not true of prity much every other class of buisness. Certainly not of universities which have huge amounts of reaserch going on and employ a huge number of scientists.

Peter said:

if you have 4000 staff and only 20 to 40 of them are technical then what the hell does your company do? What does it make?

Companies in the UK that make physical things are in a minority now - most companies sell a service so you have loads of people involved in sales, marketing, research, standards, managing the product for clients, HR, accounting, management and a small number in IT to keep all these people doing their things.

I've worked in lots of Banks (no real product), a university, a property valuation system (not bought out by Rightmove so they had software as a service), the civil service (market regulation), a press monitoring company (creates daily reports on where their clients are covered in any form of press all the time, so data mining service I guess), and for a short time I worked for a company who made mainframes but this was all on the sales side so the product was never really of much relevance.

There were 2 other employers who had a physical prouct - a huge sandwitch manufacturere (about 1 million sandwitches made a a day) and a social housing organisation.

Technical roles for IT were always less than about a dozen as a well setup IT service can do this well - I've updated most employers to such a setup or with even less staff where needed. Back end staff are dissapearing fast as the cloud takes over and you can buy most things "as a service" rather than needing your own servers, IT security team etc, and this takes away the overhead of all the support staff needed for this too.

With AI encroaching ever more so these teams will shrink to a few specialists and managers to negotiate with suppliers - even front line IT service teams are being replaced by AI (I was implementing this in my last role before retirement).

There you have it - technical staff from an IT perspective are a redundant breed. Most other technical staff are also being replaced rapidly and none of this is really impacting the businesses output of their services.

Fiona said:

And some autistic people are highly sensitive due to their sensory processing, so I wouldn't be using that (generally male) stereotype to assume all autistic people are poor people managers.

While I'm not saying all. I'm going to point out social dificulties is a diagnostic nessesity for autism. Autistic people with out social dificulties are either not autistic or have truly brilient support mechanisms around them to make that happen. That princaple will of course translate to the workplace.

Fiona said:

In general it is easier if both these roles are conducted by one person as interpersonal issues within teams can be sorted quicker than if they are 2 or more separate managers that need to get involved.

Since most interpersonal issues at work are between people and their managers I doubt that.

Oran G. Utan said:

If the project manager is responsible for the technical aspects of a project, and the line manager for the team that will work on said project, then you add more moving parts to the machine, hence more room for malfunction. If the two managers don't see eye to eye, you're probably going to end up with power struggles. The team is going to back the manager responsible for their vacation days.

In the long term that tension might be a good thing. Technocrats who are task focused often make unreasionable demands of staff and burn them out. This leads to poor retention and lawsuits. Having someone outside the technical process to step in and interupt that could be helpful.

Line managers who just want to box tick through the work quickly to give the apperence of efficency lead to shody work and practices that are far from future proof. Having a technocrat with an eye for detail lead the work planing can help prevent that.

More conflict isn't always a bad thing. Conflict within constraints can improve productivity.

But corperations have to actually make things. You can have all the people skills in the world but with out technical skills the softwear won't get programmed, the engenering won't get done and the product will not be finished. If 70% of your comany roles are dedicated to people skills maybe you need to ask youself the question if you need that many people to specialise in that.

Iain said:

I've worked for 32 years in this sort of environment and the vast majority of small to medium sized organisations (up to about 4,000 staff) don't have big enough technical teams to make this sort of consideration even viable. Managers often have to chip in with technical roles or there is suffiiently little work to justify the split anyway.

I mean that's equally true of a project manager. Obviously they need to chip in. And sure having profesional non technical line managers may seem like a luxiory, but consider that one pro line manager can probably handel 6 to 8 people as oposed to 2 or 3. And then consider that that line manager is freeing up a lot of tie for 3 or 4 project managers who would otherwise have had to deal with the red tape of evaluations, training, complaints etc.

As I say if you have 4000 staff and only 20 to 40 of them are technical then what the hell does your company do? What does it make? And I would say when you get to 30-40 staff an aproch like this has to be viable.

I've not worked in STEM but I do think it's difficult for autistic people to get into management roles. I once worked in NHS finance and might have had the chance to progress into a senior role, but I couldn't deal with not having fixed hours - management had to work extra hours as required to fulfil their role, but I need a fixed, constant working schedule.

Martin said:

Senior management seem to often become 'Teflon coated', and go from one senior position to another, serially wrecking each entity they manage.

From my exposure to senior IT management (I've worked closely with Heads of IT and Director of IT in large companies) it has been my experience that most consider this a stepping stone on the way to board level roles so they just need experience, not success.

Look at Silicon Valley ethics around this - failure is a more valuable lesson than success for most so they don't care if you fail, just that you learn from it.

The sort of managers who really care about the little people under them are few and far between as the dog-eat-dog workd of senior management doesn't have much time for this. It is all about progress and money.

I know a few directors in the Civil Service still from my time saving them from high profile pojects that were failing and they were better than most, but still bound by the games of politics there.

The sums of money wasted to save face on some projects was staggering - I saw over £20 million get blown on re-wording a project brief that was highly over promised and under resourced but failure wasn't an option. This was far from a rarity.

The point is - at this level of management the rules are different and I don't see autists surviving at all there. Lower management would seem as far as we are able to aspire to.

Senior management seem to often become 'Teflon coated', and go from one senior position to another, serially wrecking each entity they manage. I really do not understand how this happens. At Manchester University, they hired a head of IT support who had just ruined IT at the Co-op Bank. With attempts to outsource to commercial firms with no experience of computers that ran complex scientific instruments, such as mass spectrometers and nuclear-magnetic resonance machines, he came very close to ruining IT support at the university. No doubt he walked into another highly paid job after that debacle also.

Red82 (Formerly Mellowjian) said:

You act like you've never encountered a socialist before

Actually I have - I worked for a University with a team of 26 staff under me and I was hired to restore their levels of service following very high levels of absence from staff.

I was able to do this within 4 months and then was given a rather unpleasant task of cutting 10 staff from the team as the ways of working I introduced were efficient enough that the headcount was surplus to requirements.

Here I got to see the unpleasant side of management. Job descriptions were written with the specific intention of eliminating those who were either trade union shop stewards or were militant about taking action on behalf of perceived slights to the unions. I had to write the job descriptions in a way that excluded these people through their skills and aptitudes so their colleagues could legally be given the fewer remaining roles.

This was part of my contract so I was legally obliged to do it, but I used the time there to work with the "survivors" and make them better able to survive with less stress though applying relaxation techniques, task prioritation, checklists, automation and updating their skills.

It was not pleasant to go through but the trade unions were actively encouraging the staff to take long term sick leave because of stress and leaving the few who remained under greater stress.

Job cuts were coming across the board anyway as the uni was struggling for funding so this task was going to happen whether I participated or not, but I was at least able to remove trouiblemakers, improve the departments efficiently significantly and help those who were willing to work and make their lives better.

At the end of the layoffs I was of course "sacked" myself (ie end of contract) so that the management could blame me for what happened and be seen to be the good guys, but they paid me well for this duty.

Just thought I would share this experience as it seems relevant to the discussion.

Red82 (Formerly Mellowjian) said:

You act like you've never encountered a socialist before.

I wanted your perspective on it - not the textbook socialist response. Why do you not want to make a difference etc.

I hoped that by trying to make a difference (not completely reforming the "system" as that is impractical) in the area you potentially had some control over then it would be worth considering.

My experience of doing just this has been a positive one for my team in several medium sized corporations so I wanted to share it with those here.

However, if you are not willing to explain your rather extreme position then I will respect this and not impose any further.

You act like you've never encountered a socialist before.  But if you haven't you can read all about it via books or online somewhere. I'm sure you know what a trade union is and you can also read about that and labour history

As for proving some kind of point against me here and now. I do not care, sorry.

Red82 (Formerly Mellowjian) said:

This a very wounded response to my one sentence.

But can you explain it please?

I added more context as I considered your statement  to be worth challenging.

This a very wounded response to my one sentence.

The idea that one individual can reform a beast as wild as capitalism by going into management is a bit of stretch for me.

Red82 (Formerly Mellowjian) said:

My family taught me to have no interest in going into management ,as they were proud Trade Unionists.

I am curious as to the logic behind this choice.

It would seem more logical for someone with experience of working with the people at the sharp end of things and understanding of the roles to be the logical choice to manage the teams.

To demonise management like by saying you would never be one is creating a them an us system when you have a chance to make a difference for your fellow workers.

That was always my approach - I understood the individuals and their challenges (some obviously autistic themselves) and would regularly walk in their shoes to take the customer calls, fix the problems, prepare the laptops for new starters, test new versions of software and script them for release etc.

It meant they knew I appeciated their concerns, would defend them to management when justified and sort out the disputes (sometimes with customers) while having a fair approach to the situations.

To say you would never want to be able to do this seems like trying to leave yourself as the eternal victim to bad management to me.

Can you explain if I have got it wrong or the logic behind your choice of this approach please?

Most IT companies, at least the ones I've worked in, have matrix management - people report to a project lead for the team they work in who is responsible for the software delivery, meanwhile being line managed by someone different. And while I wasn't diagnosed autistic at the time, I suspect that many of my colleagues were autistic, both managers and developers.

And some autistic people are highly sensitive due to their sensory processing, so I wouldn't be using that (generally male) stereotype to assume all autistic people are poor people managers.

In general it is easier if both these roles are conducted by one person as interpersonal issues within teams can be sorted quicker than if they are 2 or more separate managers that need to get involved.