this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Autism
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I've been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).
Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn't have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.
The second group were the "enthusiasts", the kind of people who ran their group's local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don't even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.
Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).
My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don't think it's getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it's easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.
When I went back to college for a degree in networking during the pandemic it was similar. A few people were clearly there without any passion or natural affinity to IT, some had the natural affinity and/or passion but couldn't keep up, and ultimately out of the 50 or so students who I started with in the fall of the first year, only about 12 of us made it to graduation. There was a group of 30+ year olds launching second careers who helped eachother work through it all (I don't think any of them had the natural affinity but maybe the passion), and a group of 20 year olds who had a natural affinity for tech who made it, and I fell somewhere in the middle age-wise (but I have both the passion and the natural affinity)
I have a junior colleague like that, he's even confessed out loud that he chose to become a programmer because he thought it was a good career. He got his first job and immediately realized that he absolutely hated it but by then, according to him, it was too late to change careers, better just power through it.
His code is so sloppy, he always does the bare minimum to get the task done (for example copy and pasting the same code seven times, with bugs, instead of creating a new function), he really doesn't care. I've been assigned to clean up after him so many times it's not even funny.