Autism

Counterpoint: I'm already expected to spend a third of my life working with these people.

I'm not an ogre and I definitely don't live like I need to get the most work possible done before I die. I just take an extreme approach to work/life balance: work stays at work, private life stays at home as much as possible. For one thing, I've overshared with bosses and had things used against me in department meetings or reviews. For another thing, how much do people really want to know about my daughter or my crazy z80 assembly project? Because I'll bet it's way less than I'd want to share.

To that end, what's the most important thing for me to know? Connor is "crazy into craft beers" and took his whole family to Sandals last July, or Connor goes to pieces when there's a SEV and hides his mistakes until they become problems? One of these things can be learned from corporate icebreaking exercises. The other comes from the 33% of my life I already spend with him.

I have work friends, and try to be as friendly as the circuits allow with everyone. I've worked with a few of these friends across multiple companies. I've road tripped to festivals with a couple of them. I try to keep things cordial with the ones I don't hang out with after hours because work's already hard enough without me being an asshole. And I know one fun fact about everyone on my team (likes to run, D&D / cosplay guy, also likes to BBQ); I learned exactly zero of these things through corporate exercises.

Besides, everyone's just nodding their heads waiting for their turn to talk.

I think this comment is a really good illustration of what it looks like when a NT person doesn't understand the challenges faced by ND people. I don't mean this as an atrack. I'm going to speak in absolutes because I'm lazy af, but when I say ND please read it as "some ND people". It's a spectrum, after all.

If you're going to spend 33% of your life around a group of people, it seems like the most rational choice would be to choose a group of people you know something about, understand and enjoy, right?

There are a lot of challenges ND people face in the work place. The idea of choosing where you work can feel like a strange concept because we need to figure out where we can fit in with minimal harm done to ourselves. If we get lucky and find that, we're not going to change it because we don't "vibe" with the people. We're probably not going to vibe with the people anywhere??? We need to be able to change ourselves and our behavior, learning all the unspoken rules about an individual workplace and hope we "pass" enough to stay employed while not running ourselves into the ground while doing it.

While I like and appreciate most of my co-workers, I'll never really be able to say I understand them. Sometimes I think I do, and then BAM something happens and I'm totally lost again. Either I've broken some unspoken rule or they have broken what I thought was an unspoken rule or something like that.

Getting lots of work done in isolation in a cold, hostile environment surrounded by strangers seems to me like a worse choice than getting less work done with fun people you enjoy, with the feeling like you're all in it together and can rely on each other to handle challenges bigger than any single person as a team.

Working in isolation can help with issues with executive function and processing delays. I'm "successful" and highly regarded in my field but if you say numbers at me my brain shuts down and I panic. I'm an engineer!!! When I've worked in an open concept office I would have to stay and do another "shift" after everyone went home. No, headphones aren't enough. Any distracting, someone doing a small talk as they pass your desk, people seeing you and deciding to message you - all these things took me off task and took me 20+ mins to remember WTF I was doing and get back to it.

Life's not just about getting the most work done possible before you die, right?

There are a few things going on here:

1. From the outside, I can look like someone who values work above other things in life. I don't. I like solving puzzles. When I'm into a puzzle god help you if you interrupt me.

2. The "rule" about work is that you go there and do work right? Slacking is frowned upon unless it's this narrow band of socializing? There are too many rules about what the appropriate amount of work to do is, it's exhausting. Pair that with all the sensory nightmares that come from working in the vicinity of other people and it's much easier to think of work as a set of tasks that need to be done and then you can go.Thinking of work as tasks that need to get done and doing them is a pretty common ND approach, tbh.

3. I 100% hide behind my expertise and ability to get shit done to protect me from unemployment for being "weird" and not fitting in. You bet your ass I'm going to make myself indispensable by working a lot.

4. As much as a ND might want to get along with their coworkers, sometimes they just can't. Sometimes we can't understand each other. There are also a whole new weird set of rules about work friendships that are different from non work friendships and that's a whole minefield to navigate.

I'm not saying you're wrong for wanting that. In a perfect world we'd all be doing things we love surrounded by people we love. I'm saying this sort of shit isn't going to turn coworkers into friends. If I think we'll get along, I'm going to have a sense of that through natural means. We're probably not going to get along anyway. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full