Will put a vote in for blue collar work. Since the work tends to have obvious checkboxes that indicate "done", once your boss thinks you are competent you can pretty much just work on your own. Especially if you work in something like new commercial construction - literally just show up, get a quick run down of tasks for the day, and then you are heads down doing whatever it is you are doing. Maybe you tell someone to move because they are in your way.

Another benefit is that no one expects you to be polite when working blue collar. Of course, this means sometimes the racist shitheads get a pass. But it also means your social foibles will tend to be overlooked. Status in blue collar work tends to be assigned less on social acuity, and more on one's ability to get the job done quickly so everyone can go home.

Is there a position available anywhere in the world where I can simply take an assessment to identify my skills and capabilities

I've never seen a job do this in my entire life. Usually when you do see a job that offers this, they're doing it just to make sure you're intelligent enough to read so you can work in a stockroom or do call-center work. The military kind of works this way, but I have a feeling that's not what you're looking for.

am seeking a different type of work that doesn’t require returning to school, interaction with others, or leaving my home.

ngl, after many years in the corporate world, this is going to be very challenging to find, after the covid remote-work trend cooled down, these jobs became highly sought after and there is competition for this work.

I don't mean to be too discouraging here, I just know how rough it is and the reality of trying to work with neurodivergence that makes certain kinds of work really unpleasant and the false promises of the corporate world. You may have to practice some level of radical adaptation to less-than-ideal conditions. Before that though, look for work in logistics, data analysis and auditing, they often have outsourced teams that do pretty quiet, tedious work from home and usually provide training since it's their own company and custom software.

You could consider getting certified for things that don't require schooling, tech certs and things like Salesforce specialization allow for a lot of personal freedom, but you will still have to talk to people a lot to get work and design systems to spec. A lot of these jobs might have limited futures though with AI.

In the end, getting the job you want is like getting a loan for a car or something. Just like you have to prove to your lender that you don't need the loan, you have to prove to your hiring manager that you are in fact social and comfortable in any environment, the very last thing most managers of small remote teams want to deal with is the worry about someone with a health condition who may be unreliable.

Mask up, make calls, pad your resume out the wazoo and start dropping applications everywhere you can. Be aware there are a lot of scams going on where they offer you insane wages for working a few days from home and other too-good-to-be-true offers that are designed to suck in neurodivergent people, be very careful and if anyone, no matter how real and professional they seem, asks you to put up your own money for anything to start, drop everything and run.

Heads up if you wanna work in corporate, its not designed for us and nothing is as straight forward as you might think.

Depends where you are in the spectrum.

Lots of us exist doing data science, writing technical documentation, and programming.

On-going communication is a must though. If not the person, it'll be your teammates who you trust who can help translate and take notes. No company is going to just give work with zero communication and expect a perfect end result. There's always communication.

Communication sucks, but no matter what job you do you will need to have some form of communication to someone. We’re a freelance artist and wanting to go into IT or start a record business since we really love retro stuff/physical media. Being the boss of your own stuff makes it easier for us, though we’ve worked in customer service and management for about 10 years (it was horrible) maybe bring your own boss could help you too?

Typically we work in IT or theatre.

Masking is the main way sadly. 😕

No one is going to pay you a salary for that kind of work. So youre going to have to work job to job or a clock in clock out kind of job. This is going to be more of a freelance kind of position. I dont know how much paralegal work there is by contract. Seems like there would be lots of restrictions around that kind if work that wouldnt lend itself to the gig economy.

I made my interest my job.
Went into IT.

In my experience, they work as engineers, engineers or engineers.

Oh hey, don't worry, there aren't jobs to get anymore. Solved problem!

wouldn't it be great if our society would help you find a job. I would love some evaluation of skills and given something until you could find something else.

Pretty easily; it's keeping the job that's the trick. I haven't really figured that one out yet.

Depends on the flavor and intensity of ND.

Plenty of ND’s find and keep jobs. Just other varieties have different wiring and tolerances that don’t fit well with what most people do in normal jobs.

A lot of work has shifted to remote, even if some do have office days still, so maybe you can find one that suits your skills that allows that? Even school can be done remote and online, though I do expect that there would be mandatory class meetings.

I don’t know of any jobs off the top of my head that allow someone to be a complete hermit, but maybe someone else can chime in with one.

Look towards working in government in your jurisdiction. In ours, government still permits at least partial work from home arrangements, and has staff support networks, reasonable adjustments and management training for neurodivergence in the workforce. It doesn’t pay private sector salaries but risks are lower.

I think sadly the answer is "no".

Or, this kind of site does exist in the form of fiver or upwork, but of course those platforms are super highly competitive. The harsh reality is that everyone wants the job you described.

I am sympathetic. I suspect im neurodivergent, mid 40s, super tapped out from waking up every day and trying to mask my oddness.

Do you have any special interests you might monetise? Even if its only peripherally related. The caveat is - there be dragons here... trying to monetise a hobby is a great way for a neurodivergent person to waste all their money.

I don’t think so. The shitty answer I can think of is Mechanical Turk.

I feel pretty lucky to have ended up in a SWE role where I can work remotely, relatively autonomously and with limited interactions with people. But a majority of my work is still interacting with people to figure out what problem to solve.

you could try talking to the people at your local courts or court records department to see if they have anything that might be a good fit for you.

I'd recommend practicing those social skills. If you can find what you're looking for, fantastic! Otherwise, going completely hermit is really going to limit the number of opportunities available to you.

This is coming from the guy who would rather sit at his desk for an hour than go for the free snacks at the employee gathering.

how do neurodivergent peeps get jobs?

In my world: in the same way as everybody else. HR departments are the most conservative of all departments in a company.

where I can simply take an assessment to identify my skills and capabilities, receive assignments accordingly, complete them remotely, and submit them without the need for ongoing communication or visits?

All the sites I am about to talk about are exactly like this:

https://dataannotation.tech/

On one hand, you're helping "train" AIs to replace human jobs (bad). On the other hand, the more work you do for them, the more you'll feel like no matter how much work people like you do for these kind of shitty companies, there is no fixing AI through training like this, that LLM General Purpose AI is fundamentally broken at its core (good?). So, you've got that going for you.

Further, they definitely have higher paid gigs for people with specialized skills/knowledge such as paralegal work history and education. I'm not sure about the paralegal, but people with coding experience can get $40-$80/hr tasks, so the more specific your experience, the more you get paid. I was averaging about $28 an hour, since they didn't have a lot of tasks for my skillset.

There's a couple other companies like this as well, but I haven't been able to get into them.

https://www.babel.audio/ - Similar but focused on audio-conversation AI training

Also, there's a few dedicated to Market Research, but I have failed to get into those as well:

https://connect.cloudresearch.com/

https://www.prolific.com/participants

Data Annotation definitely has much better and higher paying projects than the market research gigs, but I don't know about Babel's payment schemes at all.

One nice thing about all these is that you really can make your own schedule and choose to work when you want (providing there is work available).

It is difficult to rely on these for consistent income because sometimes your dashboard is absolutely filled with work and other times there won't be projects to work on for weeks at a time. You're also "competing" to complete tasks with people all over the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so a project that opens up in the middle of the night while you're asleep might be already out of tasks to do by the time you wake up because people on the other side of the planet finished all available tasks.

These all count as "gig work" where you are like an Uber/Lyft driver. You are essentially working for yourself and you will need to track your income and report it for tax purposes at the end of the year.

You will unfortunately be forced to use PayPal to get paid. I hadn't used PayPal in a solid decade because of how shitty of a company they are, but there were no other options to receive payments.

WARNING:
Keep extremely well documented spreadsheets of your work history, what days you worked, for how long, how much you were being paid per hour, and your final payout for the specific task. I initially thought they would keep showing you all of that on their website but they do not! Once you take a payout, all prior information beyond one week to current date will disappear. It's also helpful to compile screenshots of that data while it is available to cross-reference with your own spreadsheets, just make sure to take those screenshots before you take a payout.

That's exactly what my main income is these days. I signed up with DataAnnotation a couple of years ago, chipped away and started getting more access to a bigger pool of higher paying projects. I get online whenever it suits me, do work, claim time, get paid. No meetings or time wasting.

It's not perfect, feedback is minimal, technical issues exist, but the flexibility is such a huge advantage that it's hard to give up. It does mean you're contributing to the whole AI... situation. My moral justification is that we're actually making the models better at sticking with what they're good at, and getting more efficient with it.

Specific professional skills like legal seem to be in high demand too. I'm a software engineering specialist, but they keep giving me finance projects just because I have that domain on my resume. They also gave me some referral codes specifically requesting legal, medical, and STEM pros. I don't know if using my codes would give you an advantage in the application, but I guess it couldn't hurt. DM me if you want one.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64040942

(Not a serious answer)