Career problems in adulthood

[tomaustin95]

I have struggled with professional life. It all started so well for me - I was extremely bright and intelligent as a child, for instance I was hyperlexic as an infant so had a very strong reading ability and found an early interest in factual and technical information. Car repair manuals, science books, encyclopedias - you name it I was immersed in it. I never really hung out with other kids and was always at home in my room for hours, holed up reading, building things with Lego. This all caused a lot of social problems as a teenager because I was singled out as being weird, but I did well at school, and got a top class degree from a prestigious engineering university. So far so good - everyone used to put me on a pedestal as a child/teenager and said I would go places.

The real problems began to set in after I graduated from university. I did what you were "supposed to do" and go and get a job with a big company, except nothing prepared me for the intensity of the competition for graduate positions. Suddenly my degree seemingly meant absolutely nothing. The questions on the application forms all required me to go into great detail about social situations which I had never any experience of, then I failed psychometric tests - and generally flunked the first interviews. On the one occasion when I got through the first interview I was sent to one of those assessment centers where they put you through all these social and roleplaying exercises with other applicants and needless to say I crashed and burned completely. A year after graduating I was still unemployed, whilst I had to watch the indignity of many of my peers who had (in my mind at least) worked a lot less harder on their studies simply walk into jobs. All of this had a devastating effect on my self esteem and self worth. I spent much of my early 20s bitter and angry and hated myself.

Eventually I did somehow end up in the "corporate" world, but I never really fitted in. My poor social skills, and my ADHD tendencies (procrastination, hyperfocus on the wrong things, emotional outbursts) got me fired three times. In my mid 40s I now work in a university/academia which is now the perfect fit and I am doing well, but I am now a lot further behind in my career than I should be at this age. Sometimes I regret even going down this path in the first place, and I am still haunted by my "failures" at an earlier age.

Maybe I should have listened to what those people and psychometric tests were telling me back then. I just wasn't cut out to be a "corporate man" in an NT-dominated world, and recruitment strategies that were designed to screen out neurodiversity. Without this sounding like I am wallowing in self-pity - if only I had KNOWN I was Aspie/ADHD back in my late teens/early 20s.

 

[Mr. Stevens]

So much of this is relatable. I also love to learn, especially for its own sake. And while I have no issue with supporting myself--in principle--I never wanted a career. I just don't think that way. Yet, at a young age, I had to make choices concerning my future, feeling myself move toward an alien "world." I found a better fit for myself, too, after my 20s.

 

[Darkkin]

Life isn't a race or a standardized test. Viewing as such is part of the problem. In a culture that is obsessed with measuring every aspect of life and comparing it the the other guy's, it is never going to be enough or good enough.

If one finds their niche, is content with their work, and able to meet their basic needs, how is that a failure?

How often do people stop and consider: 'I can afford a 3,000 sq. ft. home. Realistically are you going to need that space for a couple or family of four? Long term, heating, cooling, lighting, painting, furniture, maintenance, cleaning, etc...(A whole bunch of stuff no one is going to want or want to deal with). That 80 hour weeks paid for.

Having autonomy over one's life, a working, sustainable independence is not a failure. That is balance. Being okay is actually okay.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

The whole purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness. See Albert Einstein ended up in parent office after graduating.

 

[Judge]

Having worked in large corporations for a majority of my adult working life, I came to realize just how many neuroptypical skillsets were required to excel in such an environment. Indeed in this instance "hindsight is 20-20". I too didn't put it all together until my corporate years were well behind me.

Though It helped that I could observe corporate politics and how critical the projection of blind loyalty and conformity to corporate culture was. Though in my heart and mind I found it all alien and a bit silly. More masking...but on a much more sophisticated level. Where you always had to "keep eyes in the back of your head" and trust no one. Knowing that to use your initiative could be highly risky as opposed to worshiping nebulous mediocrity.

Agreed, it's a poor environment for much of anyone who marches to the beat of their own drum. Whether IMO they are neurodiverse or neurotypical.

Perhaps the greatest literary work that helped me to understand such an environment and all its social dynamics is a very old work titled "The Prince And The Discourses" by Niccolo Machiavelli. Sad, but profoundly true IMO.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

As a teen and young adult i did not know I was autistic and was severely socially delayed (diagnosed at 60). Yet now I see how my mind, good at making connections, understanding uncertainty, and technical focus, allowed me to exell in a technical capacity. I was able to contribute significantly, being published and gaining a couple of patents. I never had the social skills for supervision or management, but am happy that I was in demand for my non-judgmental problem solving. In fact, at some training sessions I was persona non grata for pointing out the ways that Jack Welch was a fraud, well before his critics laced up their shoes: https://www.google.com/url?q=https:...kQFnoECAMQAg&usg=AOvVaw2nPf6CWZ6BNLSXjle0Sg7J . My focus also let me learn and apply statistical analysis in manufacturing and some PhD Statisticians liked working with me.

Concentrating on the social in hiring practices will surely further degrade our industrial capabilities. I got along quite well with Engineering. At meetings you could see our neurology as a lot of avoiding eye contact happened.

 

[kityoume]

Do you have any other ideas of what you would like to do?

since you are a teacher, now in the age of the Internet and technology, you could promote yourself as a teacher, for example, through a YouTube channel or tiktok
perhaps there is an opportunity to somehow advance in your profession now

 

[tomaustin95]

As a teen and young adult i did not know I was autistic and was severely socially delayed (diagnosed at 60). Yet now I see how my mind, good at making connections, understanding uncertainty, and technical focus, allowed me to exell in a technical capacity. I was able to contribute significantly, being published and gaining a couple of patents. I never had the social skills for supervision or management, but am happy that I was in demand for my non-judgmental problem solving. In fact, at some training sessions I was persona non grata for pointing out the ways that Jack Welch was a fraud, well before his critics laced up their shoes: https://www.google.com/url?q=https:...kQFnoECAMQAg&usg=AOvVaw2nPf6CWZ6BNLSXjle0Sg7J . My focus also let me learn and apply statistical analysis in manufacturing and some PhD Statisticians liked working with me.

Concentrating on the social in hiring practices will surely further degrade our industrial capabilities. I got along quite well with Engineering. At meetings you could see our neurology as a lot of avoiding eye contact happened.

What makes me angry now looking back was that recruitment policies and procedures operated by large corporations 20 years ago was geared up to deliberately screen out neurodiverse people and populate organisations with "square peg for square hole" personality types who they could simply mould in the company image. Suddenly neurodiversity is being celebrated and valued.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

What makes me angry now looking back was that recruitment policies and procedures operated by large corporations 20 years ago was geared up to deliberately screen out neurodiverse people and populate organisations with "square peg for square hole" personality types who they could simply mould in the company image. Suddenly neurodiversity is being celebrated and valued.

Let's hope that our neurodiversity will be valued. It was a burden to me in other aspects. At a time when I was having successes, being published in molecular genetics and experimental pathology, my lack of social maturity kept me feeling isolated and lonely. That ended up being traumatic for me and now I see some struggling to make connection also. You would think with some of our characteristics; easy affection, focus, and drive, that we would be noticed for relationships. But for many our neurodiversity is a bridge too far.

 

[VictorR]

What makes me angry now looking back was that recruitment policies and procedures operated by large corporations 20 years ago was geared up to deliberately screen out neurodiverse people and populate organisations with "square peg for square hole" personality types who they could simply mould in the company image. Suddenly neurodiversity is being celebrated and valued.

While lots of organizations in their promotional materials bill themselves as disability and neurodiversity friendly, the majority of hiring initiatives that I've seen are targeted towards IT / CS workers, where neurodiversity already exists in higher proportions than in the general population.

Furthermore, many organizations are still struggling to actually provide support to new and existing staff with disabilities, and turnover rates for disabled staff remains significantly higher than that for staff in general. A lot of this comes down to middle and front line managers and supervisors being uninformed, and not having incentives to actually support their staff, despite the fact that the majority of adaptations have little or no costs involved.

 

[MNAus]

I have struggled with professional life. It all started so well for me - I was extremely bright and intelligent as a child, for instance I was hyperlexic as an infant so had a very strong reading ability and found an early interest in factual and technical information. Car repair manuals, science books, encyclopedias - you name it I was immersed in it. I never really hung out with other kids and was always at home in my room for hours, holed up reading, building things with Lego. This all caused a lot of social problems as a teenager because I was singled out as being weird, but I did well at school, and got a top class degree from a prestigious engineering university. So far so good - everyone used to put me on a pedestal as a child/teenager and said I would go places.

The real problems began to set in after I graduated from university. I did what you were "supposed to do" and go and get a job with a big company, except nothing prepared me for the intensity of the competition for graduate positions. Suddenly my degree seemingly meant absolutely nothing. The questions on the application forms all required me to go into great detail about social situations which I had never any experience of, then I failed psychometric tests - and generally flunked the first interviews. On the one occasion when I got through the first interview I was sent to one of those assessment centers where they put you through all these social and roleplaying exercises with other applicants and needless to say I crashed and burned completely. A year after graduating I was still unemployed, whilst I had to watch the indignity of many of my peers who had (in my mind at least) worked a lot less harder on their studies simply walk into jobs. All of this had a devastating effect on my self esteem and self worth. I spent much of my early 20s bitter and angry and hated myself.

Eventually I did somehow end up in the "corporate" world, but I never really fitted in. My poor social skills, and my ADHD tendencies (procrastination, hyperfocus on the wrong things, emotional outbursts) got me fired three times. In my mid 40s I now work in a university/academia which is now the perfect fit and I am doing well, but I am now a lot further behind in my career than I should be at this age. Sometimes I regret even going down this path in the first place, and I am still haunted by my "failures" at an earlier age.

Maybe I should have listened to what those people and psychometric tests were telling me back then. I just wasn't cut out to be a "corporate man" in an NT-dominated world, and recruitment strategies that were designed to screen out neurodiversity. Without this sounding like I am wallowing in self-pity - if only I had KNOWN I was Aspie/ADHD back in my late teens/early 20s.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for this post, it means a lot to hear there are others with very similar experiences. I've only recently discovered I'm ASD, though apparently it's been obvious enough that people have outright suggested it to me a few times. It took the diagnosis of two of my kids, and a bunch of other relatives before my psychologist broached the subject. I know a diagnosis can tend to become the hammer that fixes every problem as a nail, but looking back on my career a lot of it now makes sense. I hope you don't mind me writing my experiences here. Maybe it might interest you or other readers.

Like you I did very well academically, but unlike you didn't hit my potential because anxiety surfaced and I turned to some bad emotional supports to get me through. Still, I graduated from uni and took a very decent first step on the career ladder thanks to a friend. That's where it started to go more wrong.

I'd always assumed work was about, well, working. I thought there was a bunch of stuff to be done, and the better you were at doing it the better you would do. That sounded ideal, because I was good at doing stuff. I could figure out any problem, for sure. But no, there was this other stuff. People were getting things for free: getting promotions, pay rises, new titles and power. People in my team who were not that good became my boss! That didn't appeal to my sense of how things should be. Not at all. It wasn't fair! Gossip, and politics, and networking, and alliances, and backstabbing, and ass-kissing all made such a difference. And I was TERRIBLE at that. But that wasn't something I could accept. I mean, I could solve anything, how difficult could it be to do this stuff? I'd beat them at their own game, and THEN maybe we could get back to doing the important stuff: working.

So I set out to watch, and learn. But it didn't work. I'd try the same tactics and get in serious trouble. People would give me weird looks or get angry. That person in my team who became my boss by smooching up to the manager and bad-mouthing others? Well, we'd see how she liked a taste of her own medicine. But it went terribly wrong. I came out looking awful, she just sashayed along with a grin and got another promotion. It was effortless for them, they didn't need to think. They didn't need to expend energy, they just went ahead poisoning this cup, kissing that backside, giving out fake concern, laughing at jokes that weren't funny. I just couldn't do it. At the heart of it all I couldn't lie. I just can't. Not "won't", but "can't". Like I can't swallow a donkey whole, no matter how much someone might claim I can.

My wife (by this point) just told me I was too nice, that I needed to use people a bit, that this was how the world worked and you needed to play the game to win. So I tried harder, and failed harder. The whole politics, gossip and networking side remained something that burned my energy rapidly just to achieve below mediocre outcomes. Like someone wed to the geocentric model it just became a horrible tangled mess. The sheer f**king brainpower I expended on trying to make it work. I didn't understand why. Now I do. I thought they were just better at it than me. Turns out I'm just not NT.

It's fair to say at one point it started to affect my mental health. I started to become irritable and frustrated as well as a bit obsessed. And then despondent. I mean, what's the point in trying? What's the point in working your backside off making things that work, that are right, that solve the problems if you get overshadowed and trodden on by someone who can just sweettalk their way above you?

I'm not out of this yet. I still have an overwhelming feeling of unfairness. I now run my own business, which keeps me out of trouble pretty well as I can just ignore the politics at clients and get on with delivering value. But I still face the need to gain clients, and the same old problems arise: the politics, cliques and alliances that I'm shut out of - all inviting each other to events, all slapping each others backs - and realistically am poorly equipped to beat or join.

My psychologist has helped. She said "You only need one. You don't need it all. You only need one". It's a battle to not try and set the world to rights, but I think my health depends on me accepting that I only need one.

 

[Judge]

What makes me angry now looking back was that recruitment policies and procedures operated by large corporations 20 years ago was geared up to deliberately screen out neurodiverse people and populate organisations with "square peg for square hole" personality types who they could simply mould in the company image. Suddenly neurodiversity is being celebrated and valued.

This reminds me of three letters.

I-B-M