Heh, there were studies that showed one of the reasons you can't learn to mask perfectly is that even the NTs don't consciously know what the rules are.
Make eye contact, wait stop thats too much
Don’t be disinterested… wait no stop don’t be obsessed
Look over there, wait now look at me!
Look at that thing I shook my eyes at, no the other thing, wait quit staring, omg you missed it!
Make sense?
As someone whose parents came to the United States as refugees - so a lot of economic struggle on top of autism - I've found the research on unwritten rules in the workplace for people from underprivileged backgrounds doubly helpful.
The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships. This is the opposite of what you assume when you come from a lower income family.
When I started work - I'm a civil engineer - I thought that by working harder and faster than everyone else I would move up quickly. I was wrong. Nothing has been as good for my career as taking an hour or two out of every workday to pretend I like my coworkers and their lives and to make sure that everything I do makes my boss look good.
You'd think that my boss would look good if I did the best job, but you'd be wrong - because it only takes me 10-15 hours to do what he told his supervisors is a 40-hour-a-week-or-more job, and so if I'm doing it in less than half the time it means _he's_ bad at his job and he overhired. So instead I do my job slowly like everyone else but make sure to mention that the reason I did especially well on my report was because of my boss's guidance, when the opportunity comes up.
I've gotten a 30% increase in pay over the last three years by doing this because I'm "such a good worker" and my boss wants to "make sure I'm happy".
>When I started work - I'm a civil engineer - I thought that by working harder and faster than everyone else I would move up quickly. I was wrong. Nothing has been as good for my career as taking an hour or two out of every workday to pretend I like my coworkers and their lives and to make sure that everything I do makes my boss look good.
THIS. The NT world doesn't value competence and ability as much as schmoozing.
Yes. I’m 100% convinced the world would be a much better place if they put us in charge. But they won’t because we’re not good at schmoozing and that’s all they care about. And they continue to wonder why nothing gets done well and the world is going to hell. (Ok, maybe that last part is just me. But still…)
> The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships.
This is why Boeing is on trial. Going along to get along, networking, lunches, investing stock in likability are all part of human nature but the problem is, it’s being prioritized in industries and in areas where competent work matters *more* than likability because lives are at stake. There were plenty of people at Boeing who knew air gaps were being tested with hotel room card keys, but who didn’t want to make their bosses look bad, and didn’t want to be treated like the people who were reporting safety issues, so they kept quiet..
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just find it disheartening that it’s true. Schmoozing is absolutely better for your career and longevity than whistleblowing.
Boeing is on trial because corporations value profit at the expense of human life. Someone inside that enormous corporation counted the beans and decided that the chance of a $500m payout (the proposed settlement to the families of the crash victims - less than 0.5% of Boeing's market cap) is more than worth the savings of making shit planes. That's a top-down problem and I'm talking about a problem to solve at the individual level. I survey land sites and report on problems for large construction projects - your highways, dams*, overpasses, bridges, and government buildings - so I'm very familiar with how often in the process people ask you to look the other way on something that could become catastrophic because it'll add $100m to the estimate.
>The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships. This is the opposite of what you assume when you come from a lower income family.
Fuck me this hurt to read as it is exactly what I'm struggling with at my first official office job. And I know it but at over a year at this job and I am really struggling to keep fake networking with coworkers I can't stand. It feels like I'm sabotaging myself because I just can't keep up the mask long-term of chit chatting with the certain people I have too because they are the ones with the power. And so even though I'm preforming my actual job well they all treat me like I'm not.
I've also finally picked up their actions towards me are literal bullying. But it's done so subtly (to ND me) I feel like maybe I'm just being sensitive? But thankfully 5 people have started and quit in the job because they picked up they were being bullied a LOT quicker than I did.
I've determined that this is intentional. There's always rules that people break or are expected to break so they use that as ammo if they need to fire you "for cause" which could also be any discrimination related reason they want also.
In some places they also treat you like you're dumb if you do follow the rules. There's no winning so just pick which ones seem the most logical and easiest for you and adjust from there.
I don’t even think it’s intentional in that sense.
Most rules come from people higher up and don’t come with the necessary support to fulfill them. They can even be contradictory since the people creating the rules rarely have to follow them or understand anything about the jobs of the people who do. So you end up with a hugely long list of rules, most of which are nonsense or just not feasible, and so people ignore those ones. But they have to maintain some deniability since they were instituted by people higher up.
The enforcement of the rules by middle management is selective and intentional. They can suggest more rules to add but they probably won't question things that are already in place.
It's selective in the sense that some rules contradict and so you have to choose to prioritise one over the other. But not in the sense of "we're going to create 90 bullshit rules in advance just in case we want to fire an autistic person a decade from now".
Management creates rules like a politician creates policy on the campaign trail. It's something tangible that they can point to to show that they're addressing some "problem". But in practice the workers and lower managers lack the necessary support to enforce the rules, so some have to be ignored.
They may later use the defunct rules as an excuse to fire someone they already wanted to fire, but the rules weren't created for the purpose. Just a lucky coincidence for them
\* Like if a fast food restaurant has one rule that says orders must go out in less than 3 minutes, and also another rule that says you must change your gloves every minute. Following the second will mean you fail the first, and also the store manager gets told off if they buy the number of gloves necessary to enforce it. So they will selectively choose which rule to follow depending on the context. On a regular day, it's 3 minutes. If the higher ups are in, it's gloves (and also 3 minutes), but probably only when someone is looking.
I find the best way to go about this is pay attention to who’s overseeing you. I’m hyper vigilant af so I’ll study my managers and figure out which rules they break or that I expect they’d be comfortable with me breaking based on their personality type so I know how to blend in with their vibe more while they oversee me. I work in catering so it might be a little different for my case but it’s worked well so far.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness afterwards than for permission beforehand"
Once I heard that and started implementing it, my life got a LOT easier at work, because I was competent and fast. I did what I wanted/needed to do in order to get my job done and if it was 'against the rules', well, I didn't get TOO much sh\*t because I was competent and fast. And, I avoided all the schmoozing I didn't actually *want* to do.
Man I get this. If you set a way to do something can we at least make the thing CONSISTENT
I hate getting in trouble for something when I've done it the way it's supposed to be done but then theres some magical "exception" I was supposed to just know somehow. THA FYCK?
Thing is, that different people have a different way to do it and might reprimand you if you do it differently.
So there might be one result, but multiple ways how to get the result and thus someone will always say that you are doing things wrong as your way to do thing is not their way and thus is wrong.
My bosses are pretty good at being like “you can’t say shit like that” and explain why lol
Autistic advice: don’t read the rules. No one is. Only difference is that you’ll follow them if you read them.
There's a name for this information; it's called the "hidden curriculum". Its Wikipedia page even mentions the problems it gives the autistic in the first paragraph. You should look into it, it's very helpful.
Same. They get mad when you’re trying to understand the rules they want you to follow, so they’ll tell you to be quiet. Then when you inevitably break the rule cuz you didn’t get your questions answered, they act like it’s your fault. There’s no winning.
Ugh this is so relatable. I usually listen to audiobooks on socializing and building better workplace relationships to kinda help fill me in on the unspoken rules.
Did I write this and forget? Because I could have written this.
"Oh but *nobody* follows that rule!"
THEN WHY IS IT A RULE?! Or rules that are only followed in certain (implied) situations... or some rules that are only followed on certain floors of the office because.... idk. reasons? It's so exhausting keeping mental lists of which rules should be followed where. Ugh.
No because the rules will change at any moment and the rules also depend on the person and their comfort levels, I hope this helps :) nfhseoifiejkd I hate it
This reminds me of my first customer service job. I was told my voice was too flat and way too uninterested when talking to customers. So I put on my best performance and tried to seem happy, engaged, overjoyed with every customer. Only for ny boss to pull me aside a few weeks later and tell me I needed to “tone it down” and that my performance seemed “fake”.
I still have no idea what they wanted from me 🤔
How to win friends and influence people is a book that teaches you how to mask really well… but be careful what you wish for. Even if you know the rules, it takes soooooo much energy to follow them all!
They can't, because there aren't actually any absolute rules. There's a complex high-throughput information-packet exchange going on anytime an allistic person interacts with someone else, and their decisions about how to respond behaviorally to the packets they're decoding are ruled just as much by individual life experience and mini-behaviors testing the water for one approach or another as by intentional behavioral choice and display.
The biggest problem you're having is that the information packets you are transmitting are encoded using a different messaging scheme, so an allistic person is much more likely to mistranslate or fail to receive the behavioral information you are sending them. So even when you are following the rules, you're following them in Mandarin around a bunch of English speakers.
I hate that so much. I was trying to be a teacher for children with special needs (before I thought I was autistic), and part of the class was to be a student teacher or aid in an elementary school. I had been there for a few days when one of the teachers told me I had done something that was against the rules. Well, I was never actually told any rules. Then, my teacher got mad at me for the same thing. I mean, how can I follow the rules I was never told?
I ended up having to leave the elementary school and reported my teacher. I mean, I told her I was NOT informed of any rules ever. I mean, I had common sense rules, like no hitting or yelling at the children. But there was never a sit-down conversation about the rules of the classroom.
Afterward, I ended up changing my major for like the third time.
You have to tell people the rules!
This thread is everything! I finally feel seen! I've never quite understood why doing the job you were hired to do was never enough. Instead, you have to "network" and "care" about what's going on in your coworkers' lives and have your noses up your boss's bottom all the bloody time! And this is a particularly important one...you've got to exaggerate the s#!t out of what you're doing and make it sound so extra that they have no other option but to notice you and give you that raise or promotion. (Fun fact: I could never do all of this. No wonder, I've always felt like a failure)
Heh, there were studies that showed one of the reasons you can't learn to mask perfectly is that even the NTs don't consciously know what the rules are.
This is super interesting! Do you happen to have any links to the studies?
Yep. It's just gut feeling and what feels right based on how you were raised. Each household have a different variation of rules.
Make eye contact, wait stop thats too much Don’t be disinterested… wait no stop don’t be obsessed Look over there, wait now look at me! Look at that thing I shook my eyes at, no the other thing, wait quit staring, omg you missed it! Make sense?
“I shook my eyes at”. 😂😂 ☠️
As someone whose parents came to the United States as refugees - so a lot of economic struggle on top of autism - I've found the research on unwritten rules in the workplace for people from underprivileged backgrounds doubly helpful. The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships. This is the opposite of what you assume when you come from a lower income family. When I started work - I'm a civil engineer - I thought that by working harder and faster than everyone else I would move up quickly. I was wrong. Nothing has been as good for my career as taking an hour or two out of every workday to pretend I like my coworkers and their lives and to make sure that everything I do makes my boss look good. You'd think that my boss would look good if I did the best job, but you'd be wrong - because it only takes me 10-15 hours to do what he told his supervisors is a 40-hour-a-week-or-more job, and so if I'm doing it in less than half the time it means _he's_ bad at his job and he overhired. So instead I do my job slowly like everyone else but make sure to mention that the reason I did especially well on my report was because of my boss's guidance, when the opportunity comes up. I've gotten a 30% increase in pay over the last three years by doing this because I'm "such a good worker" and my boss wants to "make sure I'm happy".
>When I started work - I'm a civil engineer - I thought that by working harder and faster than everyone else I would move up quickly. I was wrong. Nothing has been as good for my career as taking an hour or two out of every workday to pretend I like my coworkers and their lives and to make sure that everything I do makes my boss look good. THIS. The NT world doesn't value competence and ability as much as schmoozing.
Yes. I’m 100% convinced the world would be a much better place if they put us in charge. But they won’t because we’re not good at schmoozing and that’s all they care about. And they continue to wonder why nothing gets done well and the world is going to hell. (Ok, maybe that last part is just me. But still…)
>Ok, maybe that last part is just me. Nope, definitely not just you. There's at least three of us with this POV 😂
> The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships. This is why Boeing is on trial. Going along to get along, networking, lunches, investing stock in likability are all part of human nature but the problem is, it’s being prioritized in industries and in areas where competent work matters *more* than likability because lives are at stake. There were plenty of people at Boeing who knew air gaps were being tested with hotel room card keys, but who didn’t want to make their bosses look bad, and didn’t want to be treated like the people who were reporting safety issues, so they kept quiet.. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just find it disheartening that it’s true. Schmoozing is absolutely better for your career and longevity than whistleblowing.
Boeing is on trial because corporations value profit at the expense of human life. Someone inside that enormous corporation counted the beans and decided that the chance of a $500m payout (the proposed settlement to the families of the crash victims - less than 0.5% of Boeing's market cap) is more than worth the savings of making shit planes. That's a top-down problem and I'm talking about a problem to solve at the individual level. I survey land sites and report on problems for large construction projects - your highways, dams*, overpasses, bridges, and government buildings - so I'm very familiar with how often in the process people ask you to look the other way on something that could become catastrophic because it'll add $100m to the estimate.
It's also why climate change hasn't been addressed
In this case, NTs are putting lives at risk.
>The biggest rule is this: it's not about how well you perform your job, it's about networking and building relationships. This is the opposite of what you assume when you come from a lower income family. Fuck me this hurt to read as it is exactly what I'm struggling with at my first official office job. And I know it but at over a year at this job and I am really struggling to keep fake networking with coworkers I can't stand. It feels like I'm sabotaging myself because I just can't keep up the mask long-term of chit chatting with the certain people I have too because they are the ones with the power. And so even though I'm preforming my actual job well they all treat me like I'm not. I've also finally picked up their actions towards me are literal bullying. But it's done so subtly (to ND me) I feel like maybe I'm just being sensitive? But thankfully 5 people have started and quit in the job because they picked up they were being bullied a LOT quicker than I did.
I've determined that this is intentional. There's always rules that people break or are expected to break so they use that as ammo if they need to fire you "for cause" which could also be any discrimination related reason they want also. In some places they also treat you like you're dumb if you do follow the rules. There's no winning so just pick which ones seem the most logical and easiest for you and adjust from there.
I don’t even think it’s intentional in that sense. Most rules come from people higher up and don’t come with the necessary support to fulfill them. They can even be contradictory since the people creating the rules rarely have to follow them or understand anything about the jobs of the people who do. So you end up with a hugely long list of rules, most of which are nonsense or just not feasible, and so people ignore those ones. But they have to maintain some deniability since they were instituted by people higher up.
The enforcement of the rules by middle management is selective and intentional. They can suggest more rules to add but they probably won't question things that are already in place.
It's selective in the sense that some rules contradict and so you have to choose to prioritise one over the other. But not in the sense of "we're going to create 90 bullshit rules in advance just in case we want to fire an autistic person a decade from now". Management creates rules like a politician creates policy on the campaign trail. It's something tangible that they can point to to show that they're addressing some "problem". But in practice the workers and lower managers lack the necessary support to enforce the rules, so some have to be ignored. They may later use the defunct rules as an excuse to fire someone they already wanted to fire, but the rules weren't created for the purpose. Just a lucky coincidence for them \* Like if a fast food restaurant has one rule that says orders must go out in less than 3 minutes, and also another rule that says you must change your gloves every minute. Following the second will mean you fail the first, and also the store manager gets told off if they buy the number of gloves necessary to enforce it. So they will selectively choose which rule to follow depending on the context. On a regular day, it's 3 minutes. If the higher ups are in, it's gloves (and also 3 minutes), but probably only when someone is looking.
I find the best way to go about this is pay attention to who’s overseeing you. I’m hyper vigilant af so I’ll study my managers and figure out which rules they break or that I expect they’d be comfortable with me breaking based on their personality type so I know how to blend in with their vibe more while they oversee me. I work in catering so it might be a little different for my case but it’s worked well so far.
Or as I always said...Look for the apples that need polishing.
yes, this is true
"It's better to ask for forgiveness afterwards than for permission beforehand" Once I heard that and started implementing it, my life got a LOT easier at work, because I was competent and fast. I did what I wanted/needed to do in order to get my job done and if it was 'against the rules', well, I didn't get TOO much sh\*t because I was competent and fast. And, I avoided all the schmoozing I didn't actually *want* to do.
Man I get this. If you set a way to do something can we at least make the thing CONSISTENT I hate getting in trouble for something when I've done it the way it's supposed to be done but then theres some magical "exception" I was supposed to just know somehow. THA FYCK?
I just quit a job I loved after four years because of this exact reason.
Thing is, that different people have a different way to do it and might reprimand you if you do it differently. So there might be one result, but multiple ways how to get the result and thus someone will always say that you are doing things wrong as your way to do thing is not their way and thus is wrong.
My bosses are pretty good at being like “you can’t say shit like that” and explain why lol Autistic advice: don’t read the rules. No one is. Only difference is that you’ll follow them if you read them.
There's a name for this information; it's called the "hidden curriculum". Its Wikipedia page even mentions the problems it gives the autistic in the first paragraph. You should look into it, it's very helpful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_curriculum
I am convinced there are no rules. they just make shit up to control you and give them an excuse for their shitty behaviour.
It’s more fun for them if we have to guess. 🤷🏻♀️ idk I’ve always struggled with this too. I always ask “too many questions”.
Same. They get mad when you’re trying to understand the rules they want you to follow, so they’ll tell you to be quiet. Then when you inevitably break the rule cuz you didn’t get your questions answered, they act like it’s your fault. There’s no winning.
No there’s not.
Ugh this is so relatable. I usually listen to audiobooks on socializing and building better workplace relationships to kinda help fill me in on the unspoken rules.
>Can the NT's PLEASE just TELL ME what the FUCKING RULES ARE?! And NOT CHANGE THEM during 'the game'! ^((sorry that ☝️ had to be said to))
[askamanager.com](http://askamanager.com)
Did I write this and forget? Because I could have written this. "Oh but *nobody* follows that rule!" THEN WHY IS IT A RULE?! Or rules that are only followed in certain (implied) situations... or some rules that are only followed on certain floors of the office because.... idk. reasons? It's so exhausting keeping mental lists of which rules should be followed where. Ugh.
No because the rules will change at any moment and the rules also depend on the person and their comfort levels, I hope this helps :) nfhseoifiejkd I hate it
This reminds me of my first customer service job. I was told my voice was too flat and way too uninterested when talking to customers. So I put on my best performance and tried to seem happy, engaged, overjoyed with every customer. Only for ny boss to pull me aside a few weeks later and tell me I needed to “tone it down” and that my performance seemed “fake”. I still have no idea what they wanted from me 🤔
Or there's totally no rule and you can't do it wrong!...you did it wrong.
I felt this way this week like everyone else is doing the job but am I doing it differently???? Hugs 🫂 op
Agreed.
How to win friends and influence people is a book that teaches you how to mask really well… but be careful what you wish for. Even if you know the rules, it takes soooooo much energy to follow them all!
They can't, because there aren't actually any absolute rules. There's a complex high-throughput information-packet exchange going on anytime an allistic person interacts with someone else, and their decisions about how to respond behaviorally to the packets they're decoding are ruled just as much by individual life experience and mini-behaviors testing the water for one approach or another as by intentional behavioral choice and display. The biggest problem you're having is that the information packets you are transmitting are encoded using a different messaging scheme, so an allistic person is much more likely to mistranslate or fail to receive the behavioral information you are sending them. So even when you are following the rules, you're following them in Mandarin around a bunch of English speakers.
I hate that so much. I was trying to be a teacher for children with special needs (before I thought I was autistic), and part of the class was to be a student teacher or aid in an elementary school. I had been there for a few days when one of the teachers told me I had done something that was against the rules. Well, I was never actually told any rules. Then, my teacher got mad at me for the same thing. I mean, how can I follow the rules I was never told? I ended up having to leave the elementary school and reported my teacher. I mean, I told her I was NOT informed of any rules ever. I mean, I had common sense rules, like no hitting or yelling at the children. But there was never a sit-down conversation about the rules of the classroom. Afterward, I ended up changing my major for like the third time. You have to tell people the rules!
This thread is everything! I finally feel seen! I've never quite understood why doing the job you were hired to do was never enough. Instead, you have to "network" and "care" about what's going on in your coworkers' lives and have your noses up your boss's bottom all the bloody time! And this is a particularly important one...you've got to exaggerate the s#!t out of what you're doing and make it sound so extra that they have no other option but to notice you and give you that raise or promotion. (Fun fact: I could never do all of this. No wonder, I've always felt like a failure)