Just wanted to share a bit of a bright point from last week, especially since I know The Workplace is a gauntlet of horrors designed to punish a lot of us neurodivergent people.

I've always got really great feedback on my communication skills. It's one part writing-as-a-hobby, one part devops drive for operational efficiency, and three parts AuDHD. In particular I'm really good at communicating technical topics in ways that engineers are receptive to and that non-technical people can understand. Since my entire workplace is remote, efficient and comprehensible written communication is really important.

About a month ago I got looped into an initiative to add explicit guidelines about how to communicate effectively while remote. I was just asked to give feedback on how the guidelines sounded — and I realized that they were all modeled after how I specifically communicate. I even asked my boss about it and she confirmed that it was "heavily inspired" by my communication style. The best parts: I didn't really have to do much work for this initiative, and I've been openly AuDHD at work for a year at this point, so they're quite aware.

They literally just want everyone to make their communication more autistic, and they're documenting that explicitly.

Unironic DEI win sicko-fem

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[–] [S] 24 points 2 years ago (3 children)

If you're curious, the typical structure of my messages is like:

Kind of communication: TL;DR of communication

For context:

  • What I'm looking at
  • Why I'm looking at it
  • Some extra background

So like "Question: Are we using foobar feature on purpose? Is it okay if I turn it off? For context, I want to do something kind of unrelated. The use of foobar isn't blocking, but it will make what I want to do more expensive. Based on the commit history, it was introduced 10 years ago to support something we're no longer using."

There's other stuff too, like making sure people have all of the info they need to reply to me without extra clarifying back-and-forths when possible, or making sure it's explicitly stated when we need to take action or look into something as a follow-up to whatever we're talking about, or summarizing long threads for people who aren't following them. That sort of thing.

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