something something i want to break an ablebodied neurotypical’s kneecaps and destroy capitalism

After reading your story and feeling my blood boil, same.

You Me

People loving that we’d fix things procedurally and documented things and then completely ignored all of our work. (In my case actively hiding my FUCKING MANUALS from everybody.)

Many years ago I found myself in a similar situation with a different outcome.

No IPO or corporatization of the company (it was a non-profit), but a colleague who got their start working in a particularly soulless branch of advertising was promoted to management - specifically, my manager. They set about eliminating every position in my department and replacing them with contractors. Well before they had set their eyes on me, I knew the game was afoot, and was desperately trying to get out of the company, but at the time, the job market was absolutely terrible. They began by cutting the meager standard raise the company gave every year, criticizing my work and work practices, and putting me on a performance improvement plan. So I meticulously complied and documented all of their demands and the steps I’d taken to resolve those demands.
At the conclusion of the PIP, my manager scheduled a meeting that included her boss - the COO of our organization, and they started the meeting by both flipping open identical folders, reading out what the PIP had stated, and saying that they felt I had not made satisfactory progress, and then attempting to move to the next set of papers in their folders. I (politely) interrupted by opening my own folder with several printouts. I could see the COO visibly disengage and go a little cloudy-eyed. They were not really paying attention. They were simply waiting for the conclusion of the meeting, so they could fire me.
The printouts I provided to them were fairly comprehensive, including information that detailed every daily ‘huddle’, every weekly ‘touch base’, every spontaneous meeting, and every catchup chat conversation with dates, times, and summaries of the meeting, as well as a count (but not comprehensive) breakdown of every email my boss had been CC’d on (which was every email I’d sent from my work account during that time period). I briefly ran through the information, and said something to the effect of “The effort of keeping you informed of my work projects currently consumes about 20% of my work time, as you can see. I don’t know how to better inform you of my work processes, but I’ve fulfilled everything on the PIP, and if you feel there’s more I can do, I’d be happy to oblige.”
The COO was still disengaged, with a practiced expression of boredom. I continued, explaining that in the time that my manager had taken over her role, I’d noticed a definite behavior and attitude shift from her. I said that I felt she had gone from being a friendly colleague to someone that treated me with hostility. The COO blinked hard, and actually looked at me while I pretended not to notice. I continued, saying I felt that my boss had made an effort to make the workplace less welcoming to me (noting several examples where she’d enforced personal policies that were not backed by or were contrary to company policy). The COO shut their folder. I asked how we can move forward. My boss was about to speak, and the COO jumped in, saying that this was all good, they were going to terminate the PIP immediately, and to keep up the good work. I never got to see what else was in their binders, but my boss looked upset. They later had to attend managerial training.

I left a few months later to a great job that is still mostly enjoyable nearly a decade later.

I guess my point is - if you find yourself in a similar situation, document it all and don’t be afraid to insinuate you’re going to sue the shit out of them for creating a hostile workplace while you line up other plans.

Oh, and there’s no shame in telling your therapist that self awareness does not equal the ability to solve or develop coping strategies. Often, being able to identify and fluently discuss how you feel about something does not come with an ability to identify how you can overcome/avoid that problem or successfully manage your feelings about it.

i’m now effectively blacklisted in my industry in my area, because my current country operates almost entirely off nepotism hires, and word gets around. i want to switch careers, but to get work placement support, they want me to commit to going back, and i’ve told, kindly and not so kindly, ‘no’.

If you are not from the United States, I suspect the majority of an employed population being hired by nepotism is a common theme in most Western/capitalist countries.

I have the same issue here. I have been a contractor for two years working as an IT person that has to support developers, engineers, architects, etc. that use ChatGPT to do their work without any modification, meanwhile I have more experience with scripting, programming, git, etc. than most of the company. We keep losing more IT people and rarely recover our numbers. Our manpower is less than half of the required capacity necessary to maintain the infrastructure of the company. After a few years since the last person was hired, we are getting another higher level manager, because we obviously needed another person to listen to meetings and not more IT members on the floor to meet the company’s ridiculous demands.

There’s multiple recent contractors that have taken a major pay cut to work here, and they absolutely hate it here because of how moronic most of the company is. The company is the epitome of Idiocracy. I have to teach people basic life activities, meanwhile higher level IT teams are just circlejerk silos that have worse computer literacy than some of our normal users.

If I search for positions online, there are mostly IT manager positions. I can see 100s of people across the state trying to get an IT job.

Most of the full-time people that work at my job have no outside experience, and most people only attain positions at the company either by selling their soul working many years as a contractor (if they are lucky) or through nepotism.

I feel so much dread and hopelessness. I have to pull off herculean tasks because I have only managed to acquire work in positions where I am expected to work 3 jobs with less than a skeleton crew for support.

actually treating every situation which involves more than one other person, even if indirectly, how I wish I would have in high school has been a very beneficial strategy so far.

I read a book called Good Intentions Aren’t Good Enough that basically went over all this.

It helped, I think. It’s been years since I read it.

Unfortunately the rules are way too context-dependent.

One of the issues is, at its core, an autistic person isn’t able to interpret these rules implicitly. The alternative then is to give a rule, describe all of the exceptions to it, and create a sort of rubric for you to interpret the circumstances in any particular moment in order to behave “correctly”.

Compared to socialising, riding a bike is relatively simple. But imagine if you were tasked with creating a highly specific manual for riding a bike that people were relying upon to learn how to ride a bike - the thing would have multiple volumes and, unfortunately, at the end of the day it wouldn’t be enough to change a person who doesn’t know how to ride a bike into a cyclist just as soon they have finished reading all of the instructions.

Edit: This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about; it’s a rule but it’s highly contextual and you have to apply this in the correct context at the right moment. But not too often - just enough to show interest without coming off as if you are faking it or being disingenuous. But this is just one tiny little sliver of all the rules we are expected to navigate.

Did some work in the US for a company based out of Ireland once and that was a lovely experience all things considered. Very respectful of my time and input.