Published on 12, July, 2020
So i've been thinking about an issue that I think is dificult for STEM employees and especially autistic ones in companies. And that is that there offten isn't a path to career progresion that doesn't involve transitioning, even if gradually, from a technical to a people manament role. The issue is a lot of stem personel don't want to do this. And for autistic personel it may not be within their capabilities. That isn't to say autistic people are bad at managing tasks, planing projects, just not nessiceraly good at handeling the people working on those tasks and projects. So my proposal in a nutshell is let the two aspects of managment be seperated. Let the task manager and the line manager be two seperat people. Let the people persons specialise in line mangment and the probblem solvers specialise in task managment. Lots of orgonisations already do matrix managment where one person may answer to multiplu project heads but generally only has one line manager (who is also a project head or who is line managed by one) So why not have line managers who are not project managers, they just look after people. Training, vacations, sicknesses, absences, complaints etc, all that stuff. but not actual bread and butter work which they leave to the project managers. That way people can bepromoted from technical roles into technical roles or even promoted in place as they get more expert so the orgonisation can keep that acumulated skill.
The way I see it as things stand autistic people get stuck in junior roles, leave for other companies or go into roles that don't realy suit them. Also if you get really great people persons as line managers they can mange more people. And freed of the red tape project managers can project manage more people. And do it better.
What do people think?
Peter said:The way I see it as things stand autistic people get stuck in junior roles, leave for other companies or go into roles that don't realy suit them.
The harsh reality is that autists are typically not suited to working in technical corporate environments beyond lower level roles (ie non management roles). We lack the people skills, the likeability and understanding of how the corporate world works to get on well with the challenges that it brings.
When you think that maybe only 2% of the population are autistic, probably less than 15% are in full time employment and even fewer are in the corporate world, this leaves you with something like 0.2% of the population to be catered for by these plans.
I think this is the definition of the tail wagging the dog.
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.
Large corporates (eg banks) may be large enough for this to work, but the politics at play in these organisations would flush out autists pretty quickly as we just don't fit in well enough.
I applaud the attempt to shape the corporate world to the needs of the autists but in reality we are so different to one another that it isn't really practical. A much better solution would be to teach autists the skills to survive in the environment as it stands so they can go for it is this is their plan.
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.