Career Discernment & Workplace Self-Advocacy for Autistics
Autistic Advice #6: Choosing the job that’s right for you — and keeping it.
This piece was originally published to Medium on November 1, 2022.
Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a recurring series where I respond to questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist. You can send me questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, linked here.
Today, I’ll be responding to a question about how to choose and maintain a livable career as an Autistic. An Autistic graduate student tells me he’s trying to find a way to keep meltdowns and overload at bay on the job — but from the sound of it, he’s also debating whether his current career path is a good fit at all:
hello! huge fan of your writing :) curious if you’ve written on or have any insight regarding working while Autistic? i’m a recent grad struggling to navigate meltdowns at work, social cues, and information overload even though most of my job is remote (already such a privilege and asset but still not enough).
do you have any advice for Autistics (especially Autistics new to unmasking) about career discernment, advocating for accommodations, and even knowing when to leave your job? thank you! ❤
I get a ton of questions from Autistic people who struggle to eke out a comfortable existence at work, or even find a job they can keep. Between unspoken institutional norms, difficult-to-parse social hierarchies, relentless production schedules, shifting performance expectations, formless meetings, grouchy customers, the accursed burn of fluorescent lights, and the powerful social pressure to pretend to be enjoying it all, it is hard to be Autistic at work.
Whether you’re laboring in a coffee shop, a classroom, or a construction site, the modern workplace was not created with your neurodivergent needs in mind. Then again, modern workplaces aren’t really made for anyone. The hours are too long, the pay and benefits too meager, and the tendency toward micro-management and coercive control is neither humane nor evidence-based.
Given that most employers over-work and under-compensate their employees and are hesitant to provide much-needed disability accommodations, how can an Autistic worker harness the skills and resources to get by? And how can we tell when a career path is not gonna ever be navigable and it’s time to hit da bricks?
My advice falls into two general buckets:
Determining which career paths might provide an okay life for you. (Career Discernment).
This includes deciding where to apply your talents and time, inventing your own position based on skills and experience you already have, collecting candid information about what various workplaces are like, learning to trust your gut, building a safety-net, and knowing when to walk out.
2. Making life in a field manageable for however long you are in it. (Career Maintenance / Workplace Self-Advocacy)
This includes practicing self-advocacy skills, developing scripts to make complex processes more routine, learning to overhype your accomplishments and pad out your resume, and finding sneaky ways to claim the recovery time you won’t be freely given, but desperately require.
The advice-seeker is an academic like me, but in preparation for this article I made sure to speak to Autistics in a variety of fields — bartenders, servers, nurses, therapists, teachers, cashiers, phone support workers, IT professionals, and more. I’ve peppered much of their advice throughout these sections, and some of it really surprised me!
Let’s begin with the higher-order question of career discernment.
Career Discernment: Choosing Work That Will Work For You
Listen to the “Failures,” Not the Successful
The people who’ve recently left a field (or seem to have “failed” in a field) often have the greatest insights into what’s lacking about it. Though some of their reflections will come wrapped in a patina of bitterness, they have a perspective that no one who seems to be “succeeding” will be able to offer.
When I was in graduate school and thought I wanted to be a tenure-track professor, I surrounded myself with tenured professors and students who wanted to be tenured professors. All they ever talked about were the career milestones I’d need to hit if I wanted to get a tenure track job. It wasn’t until I read the book The Professor Is In by Karen Kelsky that I learned a majority of graduate students wind up working outside the academy.
The people who’d won under the current system seemed to assume success was both easier and more controllable than the data actually said it was. Yet the number of tenured professor positions was on a steady decline and had been since the Reagan administration, while the number of people with PhD’s continued to rise. When I completed my dissertation, I entered into the worst job market PhD holders had ever known — and it’s only gotten worse every year after that.
Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Basic Reproductive Number R0 in…
The academic job market has become increasingly competitive for PhD graduates. In this note, we ask the basic question…
I wish I’d spent more time speaking to the people my department saw as “failures” — because they actually represent the norm for my field. The graduates who diverged from the ‘traditional’ (yet minority) path generally had less privilege than the folks who conformed to it. They were single parents, people from lower income backgrounds, or folks with mental illnesses and disabilities, like me. They could see academia’s flaws and oppressions clearly, because they’d lived them.
You can’t get a straight answer about what a workplace is like when you speak to someone who’s still stuck within it. There’s too much internal bias to justify one’s decisions, and too much institutional pressure to put on a brave face and claim everybody who got left behind was simply lacking grit. Nearly every field is rife with survivorship bias, with only the victors sticking around to narrate an industry’s history.
So before you enter a career path, talk to some people who pursued it and hated it. Find the art school drop-outs, the jaded K-12 teachers, the burned out ex-bartenders. Look up former employees of an organization on LinkedIn, Nextdoor, or even aggrieved Facebook groups (as I’ve done for one university that used to employee me) and listen to people’s gripes. In even their most vociferous complaints you’ll find sharp grains of unpopular truth. These truths will save you from feeling insane if the industry ever starts treating you badly, too.
Temper Your Expectations
Autistic people crave belonging but it’s typically very hard for us to find it. A lot of us cope with alienation by leaning quite heavily into whatever socially prized skills we do have. When our talents make life easier for others, or earn someone else money, we are (briefly, and tentatively) celebrated. It’s an intoxicating to be valued when you’ve been pushed aside all your life. So a lot of us over-identify with our work and come to believe proving useful to others will offer us salvation.
But no matter how adept you are at your job duties, your work will not ever love you back. Your boss is not your friend, and your organization is not your family. Your employer can remove you and rob you of the means to feed and clothe yourself at any moment, for nearly any reason, and even if you try to sue for discrimination on the basis of disability, you will most likely lose.
Who Files Discrimination Charges?
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey & Carly McCann It has been sixty-five years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed employment…
I say this not to be a downer, but to encourage strategic, realistic thinking. Many Autistic people yearn for community so badly that it makes us prime victims of abusive relationships, scams, and cults. We tend to believe what people tell us, and trust in the good feelings that come from much-coveted praise. This means that an organization with an uplifting message or appealing mission can easily make suckers of us.
When I became a researcher, I believed I was devoting my life to furthering human knowledge and making people’s lives better. Then I went out for lunch with one of my bosses, who told me that of course, nobody studies social psychology to make the world a better place. We all just have to study whatever topics are “sexy” at the moment and stand a good chance of getting published. I was crestfallen. I’d believed academia would be an accepting place where the rigors of science mattered more than superficiality. Once I discovered it was shot full of the exact same backbiting, careerism, and dishonesty as anywhere else, I didn’t know what to do. I was 21 years old and naive, and this experience served as a necessary wake-up call.
The good news is that psychological research shows people with complex, nuanced expectations often adapt to change far better than those with uniformly positive (or negative) expectations. The slightly cynical are more resilient than the dewy-eyed and exploitable. So please, no matter how much you adore making art or worship the work of a beloved mentor, do not idealize your job or the people who make you do it. They will extract the passion tax from you, and if they burn you out in the process, you might not ever get it back.
Choose a Career Based on Your Priorities — Not Society’s
It turns out that the prestige or compensation associated with a job does not necessarily map onto how accessible or Autistic-friendly that job might be. Just because society views a type of work as impressive doesn’t mean that people within that field will actually be treated well if they have disabilities. And a lot of well-paying positions are in fact “Bullshit Jobs” lacking in any essential societal value, which drive workers up the wall with existential dread, anyway.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber · Longform
An essay on meaningless work.
Numerous Autistic workers have told me they’ve enjoyed bartending or barista-ing far more than they ever liked working in stuffy office environments. Corporate jobs can be especially taxing for Autistics, because everyone is expected to dress meticulously well and never express a negative opinion directly. Fields that demand a lot of deep emotional labor (such as healthcare and social work) tend to also be exhausting for us — though, of course, emotional labor and secondary trauma are burnout creators for just about everyone.
Some Autistic service industry workers told me that if you can get a gig in a trendy coffee shop or bar where a degree of oddness or aloofness is considered desirable in employees, Autistic quirks can sometimes work to your benefit. An AuDHD friend told me that bartending and sex work were the best professions she’s been involved in, because they offered her the opportunity to socialize with a wide array of people — and the freedom to show rude customers the cold shoulder. (She previously worked in consulting and medicine).
Helping keep other people fed and caffeinated can be very rewarding and self-motivating. Though some neurodivergent people will find service environments highly overstimulating to the point of agony, others may enjoy its fast, varied pace. Though stocking groceries is not as socially prized a position as, say, being a heart surgeon, it’s just essential to making the world run.
One neurodivergent person who works in food service told me that waiting tables gave him a much better outlet for all his social and physical energy than a desk job ever did. Getting to remain active on his feet has been an absolute game changer, he says. A neurodivergent tour guide told me much the same thing.
Plan an Escape Route
All laborers are exploited under our current economic system. However, Autistic people and other neurodivergent folks face far worse job prospects and greater vulnerability than the more neuro-conforming. We are under-employed relative to our peers, and far more of us have to rely on freelance work, which tends to provide greater flexibility and autonomy but way lower pay.
If your workplace begins abusing you as a disabled employee, you have relatively little recourse. The statistics regarding disability discrimination cases is not encouraging in the least. 63% of workers who file workplace discrimination cases eventually lose their jobs. A majority of employee disability discrimination suits are lost (here’s a link to a site where employers gloat about this fact).
It is essential, for all of these reasons, that neurodivergent workers plan a way out of ungratifying, exhausting, or downright abusive work. Since we are already under-compensated compared to our abled peers, providing useful advice in this realm feels a bit dicey. I would encourage anyone making a reasonable living to look into the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement (also known as FIRE), particularly leanfire, which involves saving for an early retirement on a modest annual income.
If you can reduce your expenses or already have some savings socked away, my best long-term investment advice is to put some of it away in an index fund. If you’re skeptical or simply curious about how these funds work, the book The Bogelheads Guide to Investing was a pretty solid introduction for me, as was the blog Mr Money Mustache.
I’ve been studying this topic pretty fervently for years, and concluded this is the investment route that’s statistically the most likely to keep me living comfortably when my productive capacity taps out. But you don’t have to trust me on that — please do your own research. There’s a lot of investment charlatanry out there.
I realize that for a lot of freelancing or service-industry-working disabled people, the advice to invest is laughable and insulting, because you’re already living paycheck to paycheck. But this is really one specific tip in service of a larger goal: thinking through what a future outside of your current line of employment might look like. So really contemplate your options, and start discussing future plans with loved ones or found family.
If you become more disabled than you currently are, where will you live? Is there anyone with whom you could pool resources and labor? Is there an area of the country with lower living costs that you might one day semi-retire to? Could you contribute to elder care or child care responsibilities for someone in your family or friend group? Who would you like to grow old with?
A neurodivergent friend of mine recently relocated to West Virginia to be closer to two of his oldest friends. He’s in his late forties and single with no children, and the future arc of his life is on his mind. His friends have all affirmed that they want to grow old together and support one another. Another ADHD friend has lived with a married couple for many years; he describes their arrangement as a kind of platonic polycule. They make meals together, split expenses, go on camping and biking trips, and are deeply committed to staying together.
Thinking about the future is scary, but remember the research showing that complex expectations offer you psychological armor. You have no way of knowing what the years to come might hold, but it’s pretty likely a job will fuck you over at one point or another. Simply knowing that you have the option to walk out of an especially bad job can help lend you the hutzpah needed to stand up for yourself. And the more you mentally prepare to make a jump, the more likely you’ll be able to do it, and the more social supports and resources you have in place, the softer your landing will be.
Let’s say that you’ve gone through some of the above steps, and found a career path or field of study you’d like to give a try. Now it’s time to think about the smaller, day-to-day practicalities of keeping your job and not letting organizational bullshit eat away at you:
Career Maintenance & Workplace Self-Advocacy: Keeping Your Job Without Losing Your Head
Oversell Your Efforts & Accomplishments
If there is one piece of career advice I’d want to give to just about anyone, it’s this: err on the side of overhyping how hard you are working and how much you’ve accomplished. Make note of every single skill you’ve developed on the job, every initiative you’ve helped out on, meeting you’ve sat in on, process that you’ve improved, or hassle you’ve had to deal with, and announce your every effort with choruses and trumpets. No one else will do it, so you have to.
Successful neuro-conforming people are biased in their own favor as a matter of course. They assume they are above average in nearly every desirable quality, and believe they’ve accomplished and contributed more than other people even when they have not. Neurodivergent people, in contrast, tend to doubt ourselves and assume everybody’s already disappointed in us, so we have to force ourselves to be our own hype-people as a corrective.
When starting a new job, make sure to set expectations low. Don’t over-perform or push yourself to be perfect. That will serve as the baseline your employer judges you by for the rest of your time there. Autistic people tend to be very good at developing complex, yet efficient systems for getting work done — but bosses quickly learn to take this intellectual labor for granted. So don’t be too eager to show off any superpowers you have.
Working too hard will also lead to your coworkers being negatively evaluated in contrast to you, fomenting a terrible arms-race of hyper-productivity. Don’t aspire to be the best little neurodivergent employee in the world. Your boss is not your ally — but your coworkers could be.
When it comes time for performance evaluations at your job, sit down and reflect on absolutely everything you’ve done in the past year. Even if a task is not an official part of your job description, you deserve credit for doing it. Did you help a new coworker adjust to their position? Then you’ve done employee training! Did you reorganize the stock room or update supply records? Then you’ve conducted logistics work! Does your work involve completing a lot of paperwork and time-wasting online trainings that really eat into your schedule? Draw attention to this.
Every workshop you’ve attended, every committee you’ve been on, every technology you’ve mastered, every new recipe you’ve learned — mention it and herald it and round up how much time and effort it took. When you’re on the job market, do this to your resume too. Non-disabled people already are doing it, I assure you. Overstating how much work you’re doing will help keep expectations low, and protect you from being asked to do even more — which brings me to the next tip:
Harness Slowness & Silence
Do not over-commit or over-contribute. Resist the urge to be an over-eager beaver who says yes to every new ask, joins every employee resource group, attends every workshop, and offers an uncomplaining helping hand to just about everyone without any additional recognition or compensation. You might think that by being easygoing and useful, you’re carving out a safe niche for yourself, but really you’re just ensuring you’ll be taken for granted.
Cultivate an image of yourself as already having a very full plate. When your boss asks you to take on a new responsibility, give yourself time to process, and ponder how much additional support you’d really need to make an expanded obligation work. Because most people are very uncomfortable with silence, your manager may start to doubt themselves or reduce the size of their request.
If they don’t say anything after a moment, calmly share your thought process: “At closing time, I’m already in charge of emptying the garbage, bussing the tables, and cleaning the bathrooms. Which of these should someone else take over, so that I can start handling closing up the bar?” Your time is finite, and managers will tend to under-estimate (or even be unaware) of how much you’re really doing. Make this explicit when you have to — and use a pleasant tone. Act as if by raising the issue, you are helping your boss out.
When you need to reject a request outright, do not give your employer too much information they can counter-argue with. Don’t go into detail about why you’re unavailable on a particular day, or over-explain your accessibility needs. Take the blame off of yourself whenever you can, and place it instead on the environment: “I need a quiet room to finish writing these reports in.”; “We’ll need more people working on this, or we’ll need a revised deadline.”; “I need gloves that fit.” If it’s your day off, do not pick up the phone.
“Your Expectations Are Disabling”
It’s exhausting to seek accommodations. Here’s how to make it smoother.
Finally, don’t provide too much feedback on an idea or project, especially not negative feedback. Under the social norms of most workplaces, critical comments are viewed with a high degree of contempt. A close friend of mine was once let go from a lucrative programmer position because they had the audacity to point out flaws in an employee apprenticeship program they’d been a part of. Coworkers routinely perceived this incredibly gentle person as “angry” and “hostile” simply because they explained their perspective very carefully in a few very long emails.
Neurotypical people often mistake neurodivergent honesty and meticulousness as rudeness, and they punish the bearers of bad news quite harshly. Furthermore, most organizations do not wish to admit that they’re in any way discriminatory or short-sighted. Pay close attention to the fictions people at your work seem to want to believe, and only burst those bubbles very delicately, if at all. A lot of times, the safest route is to be silently cheerful.
Script & Systematize Aspects of Your Job
Numerous Autistic people on Twitter told me that they’ve made their working lives bearable by systematizing the difficult parts of their job. Break down complicated tasks into streamlined procedures, and use technology to lighten your load whenever you can.
An Autistic programmer that I know once automated their entire data extraction and compiling job in Python. They didn’t have to do anything but run a script that pulled new data from a website and added it to an existing database for over a year. There’s an entire free-to-read book on how to automate boring work tasks using Python, if you’re interested.
Automation and streamlining aren’t just for the especially tech-savvy. Maura, an English teacher with ADHD, tells me that after a few years of work at her high school, she noticed that the writing feedback she left for her students was actually quite repetitive: she was always telling students to improve the MLA formatting, for example, or leaving comments defining what a run-on sentence was.
“I put together a macro that automatically generates my most commonly-provided student feedback,” she says. “Now if a student gets MLA citations wrong on their paper, I can just type a shortcut and boom, a pre-written explanation of the citation guidelines pops up in the comments.”
Systematizing and scripting can also work for more public-facing professions. Develop and practice scripts for common customer interactions; practice your tone of voice and facial expressions in the mirror, and develop a worksona that isn’t too strenuous to manage.
When I was teaching four different three-hour classes per day, I learned that my ideal teachersona isn’t all that far off from the sarcastic, talkative real me. I just had to pretend to be a little more patient with other people than my real self was. Soon, I’d actually become more compassionate.
If you see a conflict on the horizon, you may want to game out a few potential ways the conversation might go, and practice diplomatic ways of taking off the heat. I learned a lot of my workplace diplomacy skills from watching Mad Men. I don’t actually behave like a 1960s advertising executive at work, but that show did teach me how to frame my critiques of other people’s ideas in terms of the company bottom line.
Be Creative with Your Skills
Autistic people are often quite good at taking a birds-eye view of all an organization’s working parts, and identifying inefficiencies that could be improved. ADHDers tend to be quite innovative and ambitious, providing workplaces with a motivational shot in the arm people didn’t know they needed. Though these qualities get taken for granted by others, we can learn to use them to get ahead.
Do you see an opportunity no one else has harnessed? What “common sense” rules in your field lead people down a time-wasting path, simply for the sake of conformity? More importantly, what elements of your job do you actually like? Can you slowly shape and mold your position into one where your unique talents are recognized, and you don’t have to do as much of annoying stuff that you dread?
Several neurodivergent people on Twitter told me they turned a fixation with sales reports and spreadsheets to their advantage, carving out a professional niche that freed them from the obligations of customer service. They were far better with logistics than all of their colleagues, anyway, and everybody could see it. A barista told me they turned coffee into a special interest, deriving a lot of pleasure and career security from their mastery of the subject.
One neurodivergent person shared that they thrived as an amusement park ride operator because they loved being able to tell customers that they were wrong for doing something dangerous. Being direct and blunt about rules enforcement might not come naturally to some more people-pleasing neurotypicals, but for many Autistics, it’s satisfying. And while critiquing other people’s ideas at work can be risky, it is possible to develop a role for yourself as the person who collects and synthesizes everybody’s feedback.
If you ever find that you do need to leave your current position, knowing how to create your own role can really protect you. The specific job positions you’ve been trained for may not last forever, but your skills and knowledge base probably apply to an array of other fields. You just might have to get creative with how you sell your talents, or carve out a place for yourself that no one realized existed.
I’m a lapsed researcher who became a mass-market author by accident. It turned out the teaching and literature review skills I developed in the academy were useful outside of it. A passion for knitting might help you learn computer programming. Your improv skills might be beneficial for working at the register, or in a nursing home. There are a lot of terrible, joyless jobs out there, but if you can instead find or create a position that harnesses at least some of your genuine passions, it may prove more sustainable.
While freelancing often means taking a significant pay cut compared to full-timers, many neurodivergent people prefer getting to define their own role, workflow, and client base. Many Autistics and ADHDers in my social circles are freelance artists, designers, web developers, streamers, content writers, porn creators, video editors, photographers, and other creatives. They benefit from setting their own schedules and having the freedom to fire pushy clients at will.
Lie, Cheat, Steal, and Scam Your Way to Self-Care
Despite the existence of the Americans with Disabilities Act (and similar statues in other countries), most disabled employees do not have a positive experience requesting accommodations at their jobs. A large percentage of Autistic adults who “come out” at work go on to regret it, and most legal protections that exist for disabled people in the workplace are not regularly enforced.
As I’ve already outlined, speaking out about a lack of accessibility at work might just get you punished or fired. So if you find that your current job is proving inaccessible to you, my recommendation is you meet your needs using subterfuge. Much of the time, you will need to lie, cheat, and steal your way into a comfortable professional life. Much of the advice I received from other neurodivergent workers echoes this.
Instead of saying that you need the lights in your office dimmed because of a sensory processing disorder, try telling the office manager you get migraines. If someone in their life is a migraine sufferer and they’re sympathetic, you’ll get the environmental adjustment you need. And if your boss doesn’t respect a disability as common and relatively unstigmatized as migraines, they won’t look favorably on Autism either.
If you’re sensitive to fragrances, try claiming asthma or an allergy. If you need regular breaks from a desk or register, claim that it’s for getting your regular Fitbit steps in. These strategies won’t always be successful, but they won’t put a scarlet letter of disability stigma on your chest when they fail.
Speaking of breaks, many service industry workers recommended becoming a smoker (or at least pretending to be one). Taking a smoke break can be a great way to clear your head and escape the noisy social din of a crowded kitchen, bar, or hospital. At most workplaces, the smokers tend to skew more weird and non-conformist than the rest of the crowd, so you might find that you fit in. If you want to avoid some of the negative health consequences of nicotine, you can pick up some herbal or CBD cigarettes, or nicotine-free vape juice. Faking IBS or other gastric issues is another time-tested strategy for claiming additional breaks that a lot of people brought up.
If you do office work, I’m a big proponent of scheduling private “ghost meetings” with yourself to put a bit of buffer room in your calendar. One person told me that she books conference rooms in order to escape her desk in an office with an open floorplan. When people see her alone in the conference room, they assume she’s on a call, and don’t disturb her.
Another guy told me that he always walks really briskly through his office, because then people assume he’s super busy and important, and they leave him alone. My friend Blessing thwarts their company’s activity tracker by putting their mouse’s sensor overtop an iPad playing animated gif on a loop. That way they always look “active” even when they’ve stepped away from their laptop.
A variety of workers in both office and service settings told me that they give their brains a rest and run out the work clock by chatting with coworkers and listening to their grievances. Building a rapport with your coworkers that’s based on mutual kvetching helps you in several ways: it ensures your colleagues look at you favorably, and it can seed ground for a future unionization push should you ever choose to pursue it.
No matter what career you have chosen to pursue, you cannot count on your employer to look out for you. For a variety of systemic reasons, being an Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent person in the workplace is incredibly challenging, and the way you’ll be treated will often be completely unfair. I think there’s a lot of power in simply being aware of this. Once your eyes are open to all the exploitation around you, you become a lot harder to manipulate.
If you’re struggling in your professional life, it’s not because you are not trying hard enough. Under capitalism, each and every one of us is set up to believe our efforts are inadequate, no matter how much we do. This deeply entrenched fear of inner “laziness” is what keeps us scrambling to produce more and more for our employers every year, in return for less and less. But we don’t have to believe in the lie of laziness, or think that overwork and inaccessibility is all that we’re owed. We deserve better. And until we get it, we’re more than entitled to being a bit strategic and selfish as we find our own way to survive.
