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   Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Oct-2024 23:51:28 JST Aaron

   I read recently that episodic (aka autobiographical) memory is specifically impacted in autistic people. I had thought this was something specific to me, personally, not an autistic trait, so it was a big surprise to learn otherwise! I struggle significantly with intentional recall of personal experiences. My memory will spontaneously replay experiences from when I was a year old, or replay traumatic life events on infinite repeat, but if you ask me to remember what happened yesterday, or to pull up specific examples of a generic category, I often will struggle to answer. Meanwhile, I have encyclopedic recall for non-autobiographical information.

   #ActuallyAutistic

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     Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Oct-2024 23:51:27 JST Aaron

     in reply to

     So it's no surprise at all to also read that interviews are autistic people's Achilles' heel, and that unemployment has been estimated to be 85% -- higher than for any other disability. (No, I'm not making this up, and I'm not exaggerating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_of_autistic_people)

     If you are an HR person, a hiring manager, or anyone else connected with or tangential to the interview and hiring practices of your organization, I urge you to consider the impacts your interview process has on autistic people. You might have no idea that your company's hiring practices are discriminatory, and they may be designed with the best intentions in mind, but that makes them no less discriminatory. It's easy to *accidentally* discriminate when it comes to disability, and autism in particular. You don't even have to hold any prejudices against autistic people; mild levels of ignorance are enough.

     #ActuallyAutistic
     #DisabilityRights
     #Discrimination
     #HR
     #HiringPractices
     #Interviews

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     Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Oct-2024 23:51:28 JST Aaron

     in reply to

     Now, the reason this is on my mind right now is, I just finished a "behavioral" interview round with a major tech company. What do interviewers ask you about, no matter what kind of job you're looking for, if the interviewer is "properly" trained or coached? They ask you questions about experiences. Autobiographical questions. "Tell me about a time when you worked with a difficult coworker. How did you deal with the situation?" That sort of thing. *Exactly* the sort of question where an autistic person's memory is likely to skip over reporting anything the interviewer is interested in hearing, and put some horrible, traumatic, and irrelevant memory on infinite repeat, to the exclusion of all else.

     #ActuallyAutistic

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     Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Oct-2024 23:51:28 JST Aaron

     in reply to

     Interview questions like these might as well be *designed* to filter us out and trigger past traumas. You see, when you ask me about a difficult coworker, you probably think you're asking about someone who was a little stubborn, or argumentative, or liked to take credit. But what I think of as "difficult" are things like that manager who nicknamed me "autistic boy" and called me that in the office, loudly, or the manager who specifically put autistic traits down as his basis for a negative performance review and refused me a promotion for it, or the manager who watched me lead a major initiative and then gave credit to someone else on my team and none to me at a global corporate meeting with tens of thousands of attendees, or the manager who straight up lied and made things up on a performance review in an effort to get me fired, or... You get the idea. People in power, being abusive because I'm disabled.

     #ActuallyAutistic
     #DisabilityRights

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.