I thought it was a great example of unintended effects in a large complex system... and the CDC asking Blizzard "if they could use data from what they perceived as a planned disease simulation to inform their disease modeling research" was an interesting twist.
The cut in pay is likely to drive you back to software pretty quickly, but: the debugging and problem-solving involved in electrical work on old houses bears a striking resemblance to working with legacy software systems.
(New installation work is maybe less interesting, but if you're the sort of developer who enjoys logic-ing their way through understanding why a complicated, undocumented system is behaving the way it's behaving, and why did the last guy decide to connect this to that, a hundred year old house that's been gradually updated from knob-and-tube might be just the thing.)
I should have spotted it but didn't: They took me out skiing one day between interviews (they were courting me pretty hard, and good snow was a selling point for the region) and I met the CEO for the first time on the slopes.
He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it.
More importantly, he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes in direction without checking if anyone else was coming, cutting ahead in the lift line, stopping to readjust his gloves or whatever directly in the lift exit ramp, shouting at people who he felt were in his way -- just totally self-absorbed and borderline dangerous.
It turned out to match his management style 1000%.
My last CEO (healthcare startup) told me during my interview with them "but you don't look autistic!" and that should have been the end of the conversation there. When people show you who they are, believe them and all that.
More people should do this! One time I advised people to out themselves in interviews--there are literal empirical reasons to do this--and I cannot describe how chewed out I got. Normalize neurodivergence!
THANK YOU. I make it a priority to introduce myself, and my disability, during my first 1:1 with every manager I have; it makes a huge difference. The conversation usually goes like:
- I am autistic
- I don't need any particular accommodations
- I will attempt to overcommunicate what I'm doing so that I can get your help if I rabbit hole on something (one of my common tendencies)
- I tend to need mental health days slightly more often than usual
- I will tell people I work with when I'm comfortable doing so, but this isn't a secret and don't feel bad if you accidentally out me.
I've never had a manager be anything but extremely appreciative to receive this context. Normalize talking about your needs, even if you don't have a diagnosed neurodivergence!
So the story here is that the CEO's brother is Autistic, and was one of the major inspirations for the company. Being "out" about my disability, I thought it was really cool at the time and mentioned that I'm Autistic, and seeing her embrace her brother as part of the core mission of the company was inspiring.
Like in your other story, the response you got is actually pretty reasonable and you seem to be slightly out of step with what other people are thinking here.
The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new. To the vast majority of people the word autistic means severe disability that requires constant care, involves repetitive stimming motions and often is directly visible via an abnormal facial structure.
In this conventional usage of the term autistic people don't turn up to job interviews and say "Oh your brother is autistic, cool that it inspired you, I'm autistic too!" because they don't turn up to job interviews at all. Depending on how severe her brother's condition is she may well have been quietly offended that you were trying to pass yourself off as having a similar problem.
So the specific framing, since it seems like this matters to you, was that she asked why I was interested in the healthcare space, and I said that I am autistic and have to interact with the American healthcare system, which is doubly hard for me specifically because I'm autistic: the myriad confusing systems you have to interact with just to get your basic healthcare needs in the US are difficult for me because of the number of interpersonal interactions required, and because I am "high functioning" (which, to your point, is a "relatively new label" [it's actually not, but that's not an argument I feel like having right now]) I'm very often not taken seriously when, for example, I have a sensory need during an MRI.
I said that I was appreciative that she wanted to make healthcare better for her brother, because it would help people like me too. And her response, after hearing my story about struggling to navigate the system she claims to want to improve on account of my very real, and sometimes very debilitating, disability, was "but you don't seem disabled." I don't think I'm in the wrong for being offended here. In my mind, It'd be very similar to if I had said that I struggled with the healthcare system due to losing a leg in an accident, and her response was "oh, but I can't see that your leg is missing because this is a zoom call."
The fact that I wasn't, at _that moment_, having a visible need, doesn't negate the existence of a disability that occasionally renders me mute, or makes me so overwhelmed I lash out at the people around me, or causes me actual physical pain. And mind you, I _was_ stimming; out of necessity many autistic folks who work in professional environments find stims that are relatively invisible on camera or in person in order to help us get through social interactions without losing our minds. It wasn't visible to her, but that doesn't change the reality of my story and my situation.
> The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new
It’s a spectrum, and you don’t know the struggles of the person you’re replying to. Just because someone can mask or play off as high functioning doesn’t mean it’s not a struggle, especially with people making flippant remarks like this - in fact one of the struggles that keep people from being continually employed is that accommodations aren’t taken seriously because people assume that a working mask means they’re trying to make up excuses. Your statement that the “vast majority of people” only equate it with only the most severe disability is based on… what? Almost everyone I know especially in tech have worked with someone on the spectrum.
In my experience, people who are dicks once in an environment where it was totally uncalled for are often hiding much more under the surface. It's like the old adage - one cockroach on the floor equals a hundred in the wall.
Ha! Sorry. This was decades ago, anyway. Right after the sort-of-botched IPO he drove off in his shiny new Ferrari never to be seen again (like, seriously, that exit is the last mention I can find of him online. He made out much better than the employees, I’ll tell you that much)
The original MetaFilter comment lays the idea out in a much more balanced way than this article does, imo. The discussion of the idea here looks to be well on its way to mirroring that on MetaFilter (Ask vs Guess became a major part of that site's culture, it came up in quite a few threads over time.)
(To me the most interesting thing about the concept is that you can immediately tell from people's reaction to it which category they personally fall into.)
> (To me the most interesting thing about the concept is that you can immediately tell from people's reaction to it which category they personally fall into.)
It reveals things about other people, but also about oneself. For example, I always assumed that people were just afraid to ask and answer questions honestly; until I read that post, I was not aware that there was any cultural choice being made. And so I learned that, partly through upbringing and partly through choice, I was an Asker; but that people who were Guessers were operating on an equally sound footing to mine, just from very different assumptions.
The original post and discussion was an eye-opener for me; before that I never understood why some people would say "yes" to a request but then act put upon anyway, or would act vaguely like they wanted something but never actually come out and say so. I just thought they expected everyone to be a mind-reader.
Once I understood they were basing things on the premise that putting someone in a position of having to say "no" was rude, it all made a lot more sense, and I was able to adjust my own behavior and expectations to better fit theirs.
I'm just enjoying the image of wealthy mind-hackers filling their workspaces with a helium-oxygen atmosphere. Sure, they might be able to think nine percent faster, but will anyone take them seriously with their squeaky voices?
Disabling a setting asks if you also want to delete your history for that setting; if you say yes it shows a sample of what you're deleting, you confirm it, and it's done. Nothing tried to encourage me to stick around, keep my data, they could easily have let me turn off collection of new data but not mentioned that they still have the existing data around -- I expected trickery but found none.
(Except for one small detail: I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place; the support update we're discussing contains a link to it, but I can't find it anywhere in the YouTube preferences or advanced settings or anywhere else.)
(Oh, and it had no visible effect on my YouTube home screen, I'm not seeing the empty page I hoped for, just the same garbage videos it usually prompts me with for no clear reason. So there's that too.)
> I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place
Click on "History" in the YouTube sidebar. It'll take you to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history. Not only does it shows the watch history, it has embedded controls for clearing the entire history, deleting individual entries, turning off new collection, as well as links to the more granular activity control pages.
You're absolutely right, thank you. I was so hung up on "preferences" or "settings" being the place to look that I missed the link that was literally named the thing I was looking for!
If you open your google account settings, the very first section is labelled "privacy and personalization". If you click on that, the option to disable youtube watch history shows up. In terms of "dark patterns", they do have a nag prompt begging you to reenable watch history which shows up in the recommended videos section of a youtube video. The only way to disable this nag permanently is seemingly to block it with uB0.
Yep, I was looking in YouTube settings instead. I wouldn't have thought to leave YouTube to change a setting that affects YouTube, but it's a reasonable-in-hindsight design decision to collect all the privacy stuff for various google apps in one place.
AFAIK, this "My Activity" page is controlled by the user trust team which is mostly independent from other products, hence it doesn't share much incentives to "optimize" metrics.
