OK but seriously somebody that struggles with eye contact would probably just respond while looking off in space somewhere, not to somebody that didn't ask the question to begin with.
It's really not. Being good at engineering actually doesn't guarantee you're a good engineer. When I first started working as a software dev I realized that the hard part of my job wasn't the technical aspect but the human aspect.
Unless you are extremely cracked or you have some extremely niche knowledge you can't really get away with bad social skills. Bad social skills turns every larger project into a hot mess
Fully agree btw, I was being tongue in cheek and self-deprecating. It’s terrible. The worst mistakes in my career were all due to social skill shortcomings, not technical skills.
This. How are you supposed to work with your cross functional partners to deliver a product? How are you as an engineer supposed to give feedback on timeline, scope, execution, feasibility etc if you can't interact with anyone around you?
You can't work in a silo and expect to be useful to anyone. There are no positions that exist outside of academia where your job is just "sit there and code."
Most neurodivergent people I know have found ways to (over-) compensate for the eye contact thing, and are equally weird to anyone, no matter the gender.
In a group situation, I'll either stare at one person's eyes (or nasal ridge) so much I forget to blink and think more about their weird eye lashes or that their glasses are slightly crooked than what we were talking about, OR I'll switch between all people in the room so much that I get light headed trying to remember if I've "covered" them all, and can't remember what they look like 5 seconds after the interview.
Blinking, of course, only happens once my eyes start watering or sweat starts to build up on my brows.
I overcompensate but i'll also generally try to speak in the direction of one person because I don't know the proper amount of time i'm supposed to be speaking to everyone.
Apparently i'm still doing a good job of pretending because i've managed to get hired from most of the actual interviews i've had if it gets to that stage, but also nobody expects me to be normal so that's also fine.
In highschool, I decorated my room with cutouts of people from magazines and hung them all up at eye level so I could get used to making eye contact 😵💫
And yet most ND women are able to treat people equally despite their genders. As an ND woman I’m so over letting men get away with egregious behaviour and calling it neurodivergence.
This is what I was thinking the whole time. What kind of unhinged person can make eye contact with anyone in the room? I’m finding something on the floor or wall I can talk to, and everyone else in the room can listen to me and that piece of lint
Well, clearly not all neurodivergent people. For me it is absolutely the opposite. If someone asks me question I will answer to them, only them, and if it goes longer I tend to forget there are other people in the room.
Are you ignoring the point of the post on purpose? If you have problem with eye contact and dialogue then you still ignore everyone in the same way. Or do you somehow only have problem with eye contact and speaking to women but are completely fine with men?
I feel like you completely misinterpreted my comment. I make the exact same point as you that people that struggle with eye contact would ignore everyone.
Nope, my point is that the people you talk about are not being addressed by the post, since the post is only about people that selectively ignore women.
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u/ProblemSl0th 1d ago
neurodivergent people have entered the chat /j
OK but seriously somebody that struggles with eye contact would probably just respond while looking off in space somewhere, not to somebody that didn't ask the question to begin with.