Technologists and our Neurodivergent Tendencies
Solving Problems with our Crazy, yet Genius Minds
A topic I’ve been studying a lot as of late is that of Neurotypical vs Neurodivergent Brain tendencies. Hold on to your Hat’s, it’s time to go down the rabbit hole with this one…
”Neurodiversity is an idea that takes into account variations in the human brain regarding learning, mood, attention, sociability, and other mental functions that doesn’t pathologize the conditions, meaning they are not regarded as abnormal or unhealthy but as differences to be understood and worked with.”
The more research I do, the more I find that most people who work in Information Technology are in fact these Neurodiverse Individuals. They are a genius type of thinker. They see solutions by combining multiple tools, products and platforms. They think on their feet very well, especially when things are on fire. But they also tend to exhibit antisocial behavior, and have communication issues sometimes.
Have you ever found a fix to an IT problem that was somewhat out of the ordinary, but your mind just sorta gravitated towards it? Maybe it was found while in a crisis mode? Maybe time and time again you end up finding a Quick Fix that gets things back online ASAP, but it wasn’t the normal fix that shoulda taken place and should have taken triple the amount of time.
I found this reddit thread, and it really spoke to you, maybe it will speak to you as well.
Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1114113/im_a_sysadmin_im_43_and_ive_just_been_diagnosed/
TLDR, The Thread is talk about SysAdmins and how they solved problems in their IT Careers. All of it sounded incredibly familiar, the methods of problem solving were the exact same as I had used for the entire 16 Years I’ve been in IT. This revelation instantly helped me to know that I wasn’t alone, that there were people like me, who thought like me, who did the same things as me and they all had chosen the same career as me. People were experiencing my same experiences, and for the most part, the same exact way. Maybe they reacted the same way too. Maybe that's why these IT Stigmas exist, and they all came from people like our Managers who don’t really know how to manage our antisocial or eclectic behavior.
”According to Gallup research, 8 out of 10 of your managers aren't effective at their job. To be exact, 82% of managers were not displaying important leadership skills and abilities needed to perform well on the job.”
That’s a staggering statistic, no wonder we’re experiencing Burnout. The very leaders whose sole job is to manage our work and our well being aren’t doing what’s necessary to make sure they are even a right fit to manage us specifically.
Early in my Career, I worked hard to make a good impression at a Helpdesk for an MSP. I worked hard, enjoyed working there and the people I worked with. Fast Forward two years later, I was wondering why I was never offered a raise, not even the “standard cost-of-living ones”. I finally enquired with my manager and he asked “You still are receiving the same exact salary that you had when you got here?” I responded “...yes?!” quite puzzled as to why he didn’t realize THAT considering he’s the one in charge of my salary. It was at that point I had realized no one is ever going to fight for my career, that I was the sole controller of my destiny at work.
Long story short, I tried to ask for a raise, the request stayed in limbo for the rest of year, and I later found out why. They were deciding the whole time on what layoffs to make. I came in one morning to find half my Helpdesk team laid off. Which meant no raise and I now had to do double the work to make up for the layoffs. Being super cheap and super hard working paid off in the form of me getting to keep my job. Lucky me, right? Needless to say, I didn’t stay much longer at that Company and moved on to find better paying work.
This was one of my many experiences showing me what a People Pleaser I was and the tendencies we have to give our all and leave none for ourselves, it’s the curse of our Supportive Caregiver type personality. This then becomes a quick formula for Burnout, because companies will always value their shareholders first and their employees second, the support staff will tend to be even at the bottom of the needs of that employee list of needs. They will underpay and overwork you to the extent that YOU allow them to. This is why it’s so important to have managers that understand us. That they learn how to manage us right and teach those methods to every other manager in the company, so that everyone in the company that asks something of us would be able to understand that we’re always understaffed, confused a lot by innuendo and have trouble communicating ourselves clearly once in awhile.
Our normal work day is pretty tiring, which makes it hard to focus. We are working on one problem because a ticket came through, then when we’re about 50% done, we get another ticket coming through, and we realize a fix immediately for the new issue and we decide to put the 50% ticket on hold while we work on the new one, yet it’s really hard to remember we didn’t actually finish that ticket. This actually seems like a very ADHD/Neurodivergent type behavior, but it’s almost forced upon us by our superiors. Is there a better way to handle our ever growing ticket queue? Either way, this is how we think, how we view the world, how we solve important problems in a crisis, and for the most part, we were hired because of how well we solved problems that way. It’s not that we can’t learn new things, it’s that this is the way we’ve always done them, it’s how we’ve made sense of the world. Maybe we didn’t solve the issue fast enough or not the right way, but it doesn’t matter because we used our Magnificent Neurodivergent Brains to come up with the best and fastest fix that we could at a time of crisis.
Sometimes when we are in the thick of it, in crisis mode, all we can see is the next problem to solve. We need to get out of their own heads and realize we should be all in this together. By doing simple things like sharing our experiences, we can realize we are not alone, and can save ourselves a lot of future heartache in our careers by banding together.
If our bosses have issues with the way we handled it, what they are really saying is they themselves are bad at managing us, because they didn’t have the foresight to see it would become a problem and they didn’t have the knowledge to fix it themselves anyway. I’m not saying our Leaders need to be perfect, stress can make anyone make questionable choices from time to time, but if 82% of Managers are surveyed as ineffectual, it’s seem like they aren’t taking leadership expert Franklin R. Covey’s advice when he wrote the 5th Habit of Highly Effective People:
“Seek first to Understand, then to be Understood”
Evaluating someone's motivations will ALWAYS explain their behavior, and having a crappy leader as a boss doesn’t always mean that you aren’t allowed to progress AND excel in your line of work as a Technologist. No one will truly go to bat for your career and your happiness other than you.
Well, not entirely true. I will always go to bat for you and that wonderful brain of yours, reply to this email or leave a Comment if any of this resonates with you or you think I can help you in some way.
-DrTechMD