I'm assuming you wouldn't see it as fine if the corporation was profitable.
> How did we get here?
We've always been there. Not that it makes it right, but that's an issue that is neither simple to fix nor something most law makers are guaranteed to want to fix in the first place.
Nothing in the rules stops you from cornering most markets, and an international companies with enough money can probably corner specific markets if they'd see a matching ROI.
> I'm assuming you wouldn't see it as fine if the corporation was profitable.
I feel like the implication of what they said was "think of how much worse it would be if they could truly spare no expense on these types of things". If an "unprofitable" company can do this, what could a profitable company of their size do on a whim?
> It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you
I think it still is the current approach, and is not a bad thing per se:
People can have their own specific conditions, but if they are considered fully functional they will have no business getting clinically diagnosed. It will only be relevant when it reduces social functions, and becomes a problem, so that's the part that will be diagnosed.
To put another way, there is the biological/research part to understand how people work and how they think and behave, and the medical part to "fix" things. The variation of people's experience belongs in the former, the autism spectrum belongs to the latter.
Of course we do this for most conditions: for instance people's voice are all different, if yours is just "weird" but intelligible you won't go get a diagnostic, if half of the people can't understand what you say you might need one, whatever the biological cause is.
As someone who has "successfully" masked for the majority of their adult life, all the while suffering in silence, I can say that this is a problematic take at best.
I am considered a "fully functional" adult from all outward appearances, even to friends and family. I'm lucky enough to be capable (with great internal effort) of typical "normal" things like participating in meaningless smalltalk, holding down a job, and doing all of life's chores just like "everyone else." However, unlike everyone else, I had to practice and endlessly rehearse things in my head to achieve the outcomes I desired. A charitable interpretation of your words would mean that "it's a problem", but who is it a problem for? The folks around me? Certainly not. This is invisible to others. It's akin to running monte carlo simulations of all permutations of outcomes before acting on decisions that others would consider trivial. For years I thought that was what everyone was doing. I eventually learned that "no one" did this, and I trained away all "problematic" characteristics of myself just to keep up the act.
So in lieu of your implications that 'passing' autistics "have no business getting diagnosed", I'd rather propose this instead: seek a diagnosis if your condition is debilitating in any way shape or form and would benefit from treatment, _regardless_ of whether or not your condition is externally visible or even apparent to others. A "fix" should be sought if you are suffering. There is no cure for autism, but there are many programs and medications that can help.
PS That said, it may be unwise to disclose your diagnosis to say your employer, unless you need specific accomodations for your set of symptoms at work. I speak from experience.
I didn't mean to imply masking doesn't come with a disadvantage, and I sympathize with the efforts needed in places where others have no stress.
Still IMHO the bar to treat it as a medical condition is higher than that. To take another example, one can be hyper reactive to dust, and that has surprisingly wide impacts on everyday life. House maintenance becomes critical of course and interior furniture will reflect that (e.g. a long fur carpet and other hard to clean convoluted forms are out of question). It also bars the person from whole categories of shops ans places, old libraries is often a no go, some shops/restaurants using encent or heavier room flagrance will also trigger a reaction. There will be whole categories of jobs that are also not an option.
This kind of predicament will make everyday life a lot tougher and require significant effort, yet IME will not be categorized as a medical condition until something critical happens. Like an asthma crisis that ends at ER for instance.
It is not "fair" in the sense that successfuly dealing with the health/mental issue is kinda taken for granted, but I also understand why we draw a line between conditions the person can deal with alone, and other conditions that require external intervention.
I could "deal with it", until I couldn't. When a seemingly fully functional person with no warning signs suddenly breaks down (often catastrophically), providers scramble and tend to misdiagnose since they're missing key criteria. Without a formal diagnosis, it can look like severe depression or psychosis or a number of other similar conditions that have very different treatment plans. Autistic burnout treatment is something entirely different, although it can present the same. A prior diagnosis would at least point them in the correct direction for treatment.
That's usually not "a customer", it's either THE customer, or at least a strategic partner with which the company roadmap is discussed. I'm think bounds like Intel and Microsoft, or Apple and Foxconn.
Is the correction approach best, here? Of course at most companies that’s a ton of revenue! I can confirm at Google 10-100M yearly spend didn’t get you roadmap insight. Can’t parse second half of the comment, (bounds = boards, maybe?) but if we’re talking companies of that size, 10M-100M is almost assuredly _not_ getting you a front row seat to R&D.
Having a mac laptop doesn't help either if you use it primarily as a secondary monitor, relatively far away from your reach. This is a pretty standard setup in enterprise IMHO.
Then not wanting to wear a watch and wishing for a better keyboard than the Apple one don't sound outlandish either.
Windows audience will always be split between the people that loved it for what it is (Win7), and those who tolerate it as long as it plays nice with everything else (*nix subsystem, latest hardware etc)
The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.
I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves.
For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?
Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.
We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.
(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)
I think people put way too much weight in the distinction between kids and adults. Sure pre-schoolers will be in a very limited place bilologically, but if we're talking 9~10yo and later, the core difference will be social experience and overall knowledge.
To put it in perspective, some people will still live their all life in an institution dictating their life rhythm, potentially setting how they dress and where they live, what they eat. That's how working in a factory line and getting a place in a company dormitory will be like. We basically modeled school according to that model, not by first looking at kids and thinking long and hard at their biological needs and how to best match their needs. School uniforms looking like adult cosplay version is in line with this as well.
> Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc.
We expect kids to get their work down, pass the scheduled tests, act according to the ~company~school rules.
I'd argue generic schools have always tried to just mold kids into what society wants as adults, and only a few places genuinely focus on sheer education. But even under the "mold the kids" premise, expecting kids to deal with smartphones, digital communication and SNS all at once at 18 is just a recipe for disaster. Understanding how to do what they're expected to, while having access and properly using all of those is probably the most basic life skill they absolutely need in this day and age.
Apple is the most profitable company in the smartphone business and, while their "unit sales" or market share accounts for only about 20%, Apple's share of the smartphone industry's profit is about 80+%.
If what you mean by "smartphone business" is neither unit sales nor services, I'd really need you to point at some specific report to understand what we're talking about.
>However, it outperformed a struggling smartphone market in terms of shipment, revenue and operating profit growth, in turn achieving its highest-ever shares of 18%, 48% and 85% in these metrics respectively, in 2022.
To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important thing they needed to discuss with you.
I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups. In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or are delicate subjects.
Lower prices is the last thing we'd expect from that deal.
reply