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.
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.