fierceawakening:

earlgraytay:

bambamramfan:

theconcealedweapon:

Autistic Person: “To decide who to hire, the applicants should try out for the job the same way a student in school would try out for a varsity sport. They should be given tests that directly measure their ability to perform the job. Whoever performs best on the tests will get the job.”

Allistic Person: “To decide who to hire, the applicants should be forced to have a conversation with me. The conversation will involve me asking vague questions like ‘tell me about yourself’. The questions I ask will be so hard to answer that people will literally pay someone to give them tips on how to answer them. I’ll also be testing things like body language and eye contact, which tell me jack shit about their ability to actually perform the job. But it’s okay, because I have psychic abilities that tell me who to hire within one minute of meeting them.”

Society: “I think we’ll go with the allistic person’s idea.”

The hiring process for jobs is a major practical detail of why I hate capitalism.

…Unfortunately there are reasons why job interviews exist the way they do. They boil down to ‘does this person have an impossible-to-quantifiably-measure “soft” skillset?’ 

Soft skills are things like “the ability to comfortably interact with people”, “the ability to communicate clearly about what you want”, “the ability to stay calm under pressure”, “the ability to show up on time and be properly organized”, “the ability to think on your feet”, “the ability to keep a poker face and respond professionally when someone asks you a dumbass question”, and so on. 

(Sometimes they’re a little more targeted: “the abillity to not be a flagrantly bigoted ass in public”, “the ability to Not Creep Neurotypical People Out”, or “the ability to realize this hiring manager is a whackaloon and get out before you wind up working for The Company From Hell”.)

Soft skills are mostly irrelevant to the Job Description- your ability to program in SQL or drive a forklift isn’t correlated to Clear Communication or Thinking On Your Feet. Soft skills are also often things that autistic people are very, very bad at. So at first blush, job interviews look ridiculously unfair. “Why can’t they just hire a person who can do the job description? Isn’t that what they want? Why do they have to make us jump through all these hoops that are not what they want?”

The problem is… soft skills are actually really important. 

In The Bromeliad Trilogy, there’s a scene where a socially-awkward scientist is trying to explain to someone why social niceties are important. I don’t have the exact quote on hand, but it’s something like this:

‘People are like machines, and words like “please” and “thank you” are the grease that makes them run smoothly.’ 

 That’s what all the interview bullshit is supposed to be for.

It’s not Because Capitalism. It’s not to weed out autistic people or other people the interviewer is bigoted against (… most of the time). It’s to make sure that you have the basic skills to keep interpersonal contact running smoothly. Most of the time you don’t have to be particularly socially ept, but you have to be ept enough that you won’t aggravate your coworkers just by showing up, fail to do basic tasks on time even if they’re critical, or be that guy who microwaves fish in the office kitchen.  

I don’t think job interviews are necessarily the best way to test for soft skills, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a better one that doesn’t require job candidates to work for free. And it sucks that autistic people don’t have many (and there aren’t good ways to learn), but as someone who’s been on both ends of the equation: working with someone who has no soft skills sucks, and being expected to have soft skills when you don’t have them sucks. It’s gross, but … what can you do, you know?

I really appreciate you adding this, @earlgraytay.

As someone (I have no idea whether I’m NT or not, and pretty sure it depends entirely on the precise specifics of the classification system being used) who has conducted job interviews, I agree that a lot of the process is crappy, but am uneasy about the idea that soft skills are complete bullshit.

I was looking to hire people who would interact directly with people with disabilities. These people needed to be patient, understanding, and not blatantly ableist. Those are… not things a resume will tell you. Knowing that Bill worked as staff at the group home might tell me Bill is a medical-model monster oppressor, or it might tell me Bill is the one guy who singlehandedly made the institution less godawful because he listens to self-advocates and activists and constantly asks his boss “how can we fix ____?”

Could a test tell me these things? Possibly, if I could come up with ways to make questions that don’t make it obvious to Bill what we want him to say.

But interacting with Bill and seeing what he has to say about the people he’s worked with might be a better way of getting that information. Does he say positive things about them? Does he seem overprotective? Does he, as a depressing number of people do, cope with burnout with sarcastic and cruel jokes about the people he serves?

Interacting with him can tell me those things in a way a quiz can’t.

disabilityhealth:

Complaining about one thing doesn’t mean that I’m not grateful for the things that I do have

Sometimes a girl just needs to complain