Autistic Empathy, Workplace Politics, and Saying The Right Things with Adam Compton

I am super excited today to have on Adam Compton, a principal software engineer with over 20 years of software experience at companies like Slack, FormLogic, Wave, and Quantcast,

doing a whole host of different things from embedded tools, low-level hardware, big backends and systems, and massively scalable systems that I can only ever chunk off a

fraction of, and I am in awe.

at Adam's skill level, the breadth of his experience and the depth of his experience.

Thank you for coming on to Autistic Techie, Adam.

Thank you so much.

I'm excited to be here.

It's funny to hear you describe my experience that way.

There's always another level, right?

I went to a conference once with a guy who had a t-shirt that said, I have root at Google.

was it.

Root at Google.

That's scary.

That's scary to have that much power in your hands and be able to talk about it nonchalantly.

Like, yeah, like I can just like do stuff at Google.

So tell us about how you got into tech and about your career.

Where did it all start?

Sure.

I...

My mom kept a baby book when I was a little kid, and part of it was, you know, asking me questions about things.

And the five-year-old me said that he wanted to be a video game programmer.

I am in absolutely no way...

younger people in their child years who are into video games.

Yes.

So I have always known that I wanted to work with tech and with computers.

I got my first computer when I was eight.

I learned, well, my first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-994A, but the first one I actually did stuff with was an Apple II.

And I learned BASIC, I learned how to program, I moved on from there.

It's just always been a very constant presence in my life.

So I've never really had a desire to do anything else.

And what do you think about like the technology?

At what point did it start like picking up more momentum?

You dabble with technology as many neurodivergent folks in their childhoods do, but at what point did you take, taking more seriously, whether that was at school or as part of

your career?

When did that start to kind of take off?

So

I did a lot of hobby programming when I was a kid, like in middle school.

I learned web design and built my fan web page for Ryu from Street Fighter, right?

But when I got into high school, I took a computer class and I learned how to program for real at the time I was learning Pascal, more advanced than basic.

I also got into helping to maintain the computer lab.

So I learned about network infrastructure and learned

about the physical work of IT, building and managing computers.

The first PC computer that I had was actually one that I scrounged spare parts from that computer lab.

It was like, this computer's broken, but one of its RAM modules is fine.

Yoink.

With permission, of course.

they were cool.

I was going to say they were cool taking you taking parts, pieces for that and kind of like Frankenstein-ing something together.

Yeah, mean, hardware that was going to be scrapped anyway.

was, if everything in it was theoretically broken, but some of it could plausibly still work a little bit, like there was some gray area that I could use.

I do that at my house, not to the same extent, like I have the traditional bag of cables that every home seems to have.

I scrounge around and I'm like, okay, this is the one cable that I needed for this one obscure project.

And now it works great.

I know I've wanted to save this for three years for just for this purpose.

You know, I read a thing about that.

It's absolutely life-changing.

You get a Ziploc bags that have little write-on labels on them.

You label, you put each cable in its own bag and label it.

So then you always know exactly what it is.

They never get tangled up with each other.

They're really easy to organize.

It works wonders.

That's smart, but that requires my executive functioning to calm down for like two hours to actually do that and to have big enough bags for that to work.

Where did you, where does the neurodiversity come in for you?

Have you always known your neurodivergent?

Did you not realize it until later, but where does that start to be a part of your story?

So I always knew that I was different.

I always knew that I did not fit in with my friends and school peers.

I will tell you a story from when I was in about fifth grade.

We were playing basketball at recess and we were choosing up teams and, you know, the kids were trash talking with each other and one of the kids hadn't gotten picked yet.

I was taunting him and saying, nobody picked you because you suck.

And he got right up in my face and said, what'd you say?

And I thought he couldn't hear me.

So I said, louder and more clearly, nobody picked you because you suck.

He clocked me.

my gosh.

So I have come to understand that that was an attempt to be intimidating and to challenge me.

I just a mile over my head.

You doubled down, you called it a bluff.

Yeah, no, not intentionally.

So I know there are lots of different kinds of neurodivergence.

The thing that is most true for me is that I struggle with social situations and social skills.

I have...

As far as can tell, basically none of the inbuilt social processing that most people have.

So everything that I use to relate with other people is something that I have practiced, is skills that I've developed from scratch.

I know, like, my son is autistic and he has a lot of sensory issues and I've met other people that have all sorts of different things, but primarily for me, I just don't

understand people at all.

So it makes a lot of sense that I got into computers.

I'm curious because I have had a lot of the same problems and especially in my career, learning, I think, how to work with people.

And I think the story you talked about being on like fifth grade and like not understanding the social context of that situation.

And I feel like I have to go with that in my own career, too.

Does that relate to your experiences at all?

yeah, yeah, no, I regularly have a hard time understanding people and their motivations, especially when someone's motivation is not either what they state it to be or is driven

by something that I don't understand.

Like, for example, people might say,

Well, not even politics I mean, yes, that also, but someone might say they want to accomplish a goal, but they are either not taking concrete steps toward that goal that

exist and are well-defined, or they are taking steps that actually make that goal more remote.

And that is just completely bizarre a world to me.

But I see it all the time.

And I've come to understand that there are things people are getting that are more valuable to them than their stated goal.

That explain their behavior, but that's something I had to figure out from principles and observation.

It's not, I gather people just know that sort of thing naturally.

When you say from other principles, do you mean other principal software engineers?

No, no, from first principles, like why would, like...

okay, this is a spelling thing.

I'm trying to, this is my autism.

I'm trying to picture the word that you said when I hear like from other principles, I think other principle software engineers.

That's P-R-I-N-C-I-P-A-L.

But you said P-R-I-N-C-P-L-E-S.

That, my brain's like boom.

That's my brain.

me, another of the things I struggle with is aphantasia.

And again, that's one of those I found out about it when I was a full on adult and I learned something about everybody else that day.

aphantasia is the inability to create pictures in one's mind's eye.

So I can't do that.

When you just said, I'm imagining the words, like, I know that's a thing people do, I can't, can't do it.

So I always assume when someone said, yeah, I could see that, that it was a figure of speech, not that they were literally picturing in their head, like they were using their

eyes, the thing.

Someone at work just told me recently that they had the exact same condition and I was, I figured it was the exact same thing but I was thinking on the word for it.

It sounds, it is a form of neurodiversity whether we know it or not.

And I think that's, it's a weird thing to not be able to do that but it is certainly something that.

I think it uniquely affects autistic people when it comes to the sense of picture something or visualize something or imagine it.

If you practically or literally can't and your brain is just cooking and you're trying to literally picture it, but you can't.

Yeah, I've done martial arts for many years.

That's my primary athletic hobby.

And it is challenging for me to learn a lot of the techniques because a lot of it is imagine there's someone standing in front of you and figure out where you're going to hit

them.

And I can't, I can't imagine.

So I have to work on muscle memory versus like actually picturing a target.

Does that affect your ability to play video games at all if you can't picture what enemies are going to do?

Or do you play different games?

Well, I can, you know, there's patterns.

I can remember things just fine.

So I can remember the patterns.

I do really, though, struggle with games that have intricate worlds that don't present a map.

I just have, I get lost instantly.

So games like Skyrim or Elder Scrolls are okay with the big vast maps.

Or are they not okay?

I don't tend to like those.

I have three small children, so games that require hours and hours and hours of investment, I just don't play anymore.

yeah, as long as there's something else.

We do, we play Mario Kart.

I actually just played Vampire Survivors with my daughter yesterday.

We were taking turns and voting on which of the buffs we should pick.

And in a neurodivergent household, mentioned one of your kids was autistic.

Are other members of your family also neurodivergent?

So I've never been diagnosed, neither has my wife.

But when my son was diagnosed, the doctor was telling us all of the things, all the markers and symptoms.

And for essentially every single one of them, either myself or my wife would pipe up and say, is that not normal?

We are both, she and I, he got all of our symptoms put together, I would say.

And so your wife and you and your wife met each other.

Did you know that you each have a neurodivergent or did that come up as part of this conversation or how did you come to gravitate towards each other?

Sure.

So I'm in my 40s, and when I was younger, I did not know much about neurodiversity.

I did not think of myself that way.

Not out of any reason not to, it just hadn't occurred to me that that was a label I might take on.

I just knew that I was different.

And...

My wife and I met when we went to college together and we got on well and became friends and started dating.

There was nothing about neurodivergence specifically that brought us together, but I think the fact that we were both neurodivergent was something we had in common, even though our

challenges are different, hers and mine.

Hers are much more weight sensory issues.

There's two things you brought up there that I thought were really interesting.

And you'd be shocked at how often that happens.

Number one being that when you as a caregiver of somebody's neurodivergent, you get a professional evaluation and the doctor's like, by the way, you might want to be evaluated

too.

You'd be shocked at how often that happens, especially for folks who maybe weren't diagnosed as a child and now are taking their own kids to be diagnosed.

And my gosh, the experiences are almost one to one.

It happens very frequently, I've heard.

Yep.

No, I don't want to talk about people I've invented it with, but in my family, I am not the only neurodivergent person.

And it was something where, you know, for earlier generations, it was even less clear that this was a diagnosis that you might have.

But looking back, like, yeah, absolutely.

100 percent.

I know a lot of people in my friend network and my professional network too, who were especially in tech.

We kind of like gravitate towards each other almost, I, whether it's by accident or not, but for some reason I have found myself often in my own career being able to like

gravitate, gravitate towards neurodivergent people, whether it was just their aura or it was something they were saying or doing.

I have found that.

many of the friends that I have made for my professional career have been neurodivergent and not even in like neurodivergent settings, just like at work or at a thing or at an

event, we'll just find each other, not even us seeking each other out and just be like, here we go, worlds collide.

One of the things I've learned that I thought was really interesting is neurodivergent people apparently tend to socialize just fine with each other, just not as well with

neurotypical people.

So I find it a lot easier to socialize with neurodivergent people, whether or not I know that about them, just because we tend to operate on the same wavelength.

So I can definitely see where it would make sense that you would pick up that friends who share those qualities.

I've been at lots of events where like you have pockets of people who are neurodivergent and then the overlap or the mixture of neurodivergent and typical people can sometimes be

two completely different circles.

But sometimes the circles can be a complete circle.

I've been at tech conferences before where I've been confident that like more than half the people in attendance are neurodivergent, which makes the whole event even better

because we can all kind of vibe with each other.

that'd be nice.

Yeah, one of the things I learned early on was weird was I'm given to understand often neurodivergent people will share their empathy for situation by relating a story that

hearing about the situation brings up for them.

that reminds me of this time when I, and I guess neurotypical people don't do that.

So I had to learn to not do that all the time.

It's part of my masking process.

So it's nice to get to do that with people who

understand that I'm not trying to one-up or distract.

It's just part of how conversations work.

that experience is so vivid for me too, because like, I will do the same thing.

I will be talking with somebody to bring something up and I will want to recount my own experience that I had that was related, but it's a no-no for neurotypical people.

And so I have to really dial that back or I only talk about it if it's like directly relevant and building on top of what they were saying rather than just...

repeating it and that that does feel like a very conscious masking choice, which sometimes I struggle to do.

Yep, no, I had to basically construct my autistic mask from scratch, so I decided to make it personable.

And what does that masking look like to you, especially in the workplace?

So you're a very well-respected, recognized member of your community and of your organization.

How do you find that people get along and work with you?

Not necessarily around you, but learn how to work the way that Adam can thrive in.

One of the things that I find challenging and that I have to since you asked about masking

I tend to look at problems from a very instrumental perspective.

Like this is not doing what it's supposed to do.

This is slower than it could be.

It's just causing various issues.

And let's solve this problem.

Let's fix this.

Let's make this better.

And I run into situations pretty frequently where things are the way they are for a reason that is obscure to me.

Like someone with a lot of

pull built it and doesn't want it to change or There's you know, there's a turf war across different teams about who ought to be responsible for it and nobody wants to touch it

because if they do then it'll be theirs forever and Yeah, hot potato.

So I I regularly run into stuff like that where I find something that is

technically could stand to be improved, right?

Either made better or made less worse.

And there are social realities around why it is the way it is that I have to try and understand.

And then conversely for my end, I try to make sure that when I'm making changes, I am conscious of why things are the way they are and what...

what the impact of my changes might be on the people around me.

So as to not go into a pull request and tear it to shreds and say, this is all horrible because that'll make someone feel bad, even if it is all horrible.

you want to be thoughtful about why this is the way that it is and how to negotiate the way things are today with how you think they should be in the end.

And the way that you communicate that involves a high degree of masking to make sure that people like our understanding the put you're trying to make, but not not misrepresenting

what you actually believe.

Yeah, I think that's a good characterization.

Plus, you you catch more flies with honey.

If you go into a situation acting like you know best and not giving people any kind of respect, then they will tend not to do what you want.

But you have the experience, you have the leverage.

There are a few principle engineers out there.

So you do have the unique ability to leverage your experience and your titles to be able to effect change that would not be possible for a senior software engineer or an

entry-level engineer.

So how do you think about negotiating that experience that you have with also balancing the people politics of...

So I worked in my career for a while as a manager, as an engineering manager for a couple of years.

And I reported directly to the SVP of engineering at that company who was at the time the most senior technologist.

There was no CTO.

And I had the experience of watching him try to...

use as light a touch as possible and still just crush things.

If he saw something that was not the way he wanted it to be, he couldn't just go to the person who built it and say, hey, could you maybe like make this change this button so

it's a different color or something?

Because then it's the SVP of engineering is telling you to make a change.

What are the implications?

And so I bring that up because the more

seniority you have, the more influence you have, the larger a footprint you leave.

And it's really difficult to not wield that power in a very coarse way, to not leave a large footprint.

Like, if you send a message to someone and say, hey, can you make this change?

Is it, you know, a...

peer engineer asking for a favor or giving some guidance, or is it the principal engineer responsible for cloud infrastructure demanding that this be done like you drop everything

else and do this immediately?

And from my end, it's not always up to me how those things are received.

So I try really hard not to tell people what to do.

I try to help them understand why the things that are important to me are important to me and why they

should be important to them too.

And through that process, bringing them around to my way of thinking, and once they understand where I'm coming from, sometimes they'll say, yeah, you're right.

I see why that button needs to be over there.

It needs to be a different color or whatever, without me having to explicitly say, make this change.

Autistic people that I know are either really good or really struggle with being able to articulate that why.

I said this to someone earlier, I think because I have historically struggled with being able to articulate myself, I'm now kind of over indexing and I'm good about articulating

myself.

I'm not sure if you've had the same experience, but I'm curious how you as an autistic person think about telling the tongue what to say in moments like that.

I don't...

I don't have much trouble with it.

The thing that...

Well, okay, so I do...

My natural inclination is to be as direct as possible, not out of any sort of sense of being rude, but as, you know, it's the most efficient way.

you know, this is why it matter.

Yeah, I want to get to the point.

Like, why have a conversation that doesn't tell people what it is that you want to tell them?

But for neurotypical people, you know, a lot of conversation is...

in the small talk, in the niceties and the tone of voice and the trying to align your frame of reference with theirs so that you're setting the conversational footing in a

comfortable place for all parties and then you can start having those discussions versus entering the conversation and then starting the ask immediately.

I don't have any trouble necessarily figuring out what I want people to understand, what I want them to, what I want to convey about what's important to me, but...

having to figure out how to get everybody onto the same page and emulate those conversational niceties and make sure that people are in a space where they can hear what

I'm trying to say without feeling defensive or having preconceptions or being distracted by something else that's on their mind.

that's scaffolding that I have to build, that is challenging for me.

That takes a lot of effort.

Once that scaffolding is in place, communicating what it is I want to share, I don't have that much trouble with.

For neurodivergent software engineers who are listening and wondering how can I build upon those skills and become more confident in that, what would you say to those sorts of

people who are looking to become stronger communicators, stronger leaders?

So I'll tell a quick story and then I'll give a more direct answer.

When I was a manager, I had a report who was in a road office who wanted himself to get into leadership.

So I came up with a clever plan to say, let's hire him an intern and then he can practice and then he can become a manager and manage that intern.

And I went to my boss and said, hey, here's my plan.

And my boss said, no, you can't have that.

And he was angry with me.

And I did not understand why.

And

I later unpacked this with a friend and the friend explained to me that managers can't manage other managers.

So setting out a path for my report to become a manager was implying that I would have to be a senior manager to be his boss still.

So I was implicitly asking for a promotion for myself from my boss, but I didn't understand that I was doing that.

So

my boss can't say yes because I'm obviously not qualified to be a senior manager because I don't understand that that's what I'm asking for.

And further, he didn't want to explain it to me because if I'm this unqualified to be a senior manager, then obviously I'm not cut out to be a manager and there's no sense

investing time and training me up to do a better job because I'm so clueless.

So.

I had that conversation, it took maybe 10 minutes with my boss, and it's taken me years to fully digest all the lessons I learned from having and unpacking it.

So to more directly answer your question, attempting to understand where the other people in the conversation are coming from, what their constraints are, what their priorities

are, what matters to them, what their values are.

doing all of that preparatory work, either outside of the meeting or in the moment, helps me inform what I'm going to say, helps me tune what I'm going to say in a way that the

person I'm talking to will be able to take it on board.

What I'm hearing is like doing pre-work, doing some more investigation and trying to understand like, what are we doing here?

What are we trying to accomplish?

And what are we actually going after?

Whether it is a people management thing to help someone with their skills or it's a specific goal or a business objective or something like that.

I really resonate with that.

Even if it's as practical and simple as an agenda for a meeting or if it's something longer term than that, I really resonate with that.

So I'll agree in part, disagree in part.

I do agree about pre-work, but the specific thing I'm trying to get at, and I realize I'm not maybe communicating it very well, is understanding the people that you are talking to

as individuals, doing that preparatory work to understand their motivations and priorities and beliefs and values.

I find that's something that I do when I'm talking to people and...

I've never read any business books or guidelines that tell me to do that because they're all written for neurotypical people.

But it's hard for me to make a case unless I am deeply considering my audience as specific individual humans and figuring out the best way to make that case to them.

The audience is a key part of that and prep work to understand my audience is necessary as part of making the case.

people how they want to be treated.

If somebody maybe needs those politics and needs those warming up to get to the goal, maybe that's what that person needs to be successful or to get them to give you what you

need or understand where they're coming from is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, so communication is both sending a message and receiving a message.

And in my experience, both in my own career and in working with other people who are neurodivergent, people focus on the sending of the message and kind of neglect to see

whether it's been received and then can sometimes get a little bit upset if...

If they really crafted the message and it's been definitely sent and it wasn't received, well, that's not their fault.

The thing that, since you were asking about people wanting to improve their communication skills and wanting to build this, you have to make sure that the message is actually

received by the person you're sending it to.

You have to make sure that that communication turned up in their brain the way it started in yours.

and whatever.

whatever steps you need to take to make that happen, whether it's considering the audience, whether it's figuring out the best way to phrase things, whether it's checking

for understanding after, like asking people, did that make sense to you?

The communication, you have to get an ACK, right?

I do some networking stuff, so you send your communication and you have to get an ACK to make sure that they received it.

It isn't fully communicated until...

You get that back until you understand that they got what you meant.

So sending it is not Yeah

a slack emoji, a response, but something more than that.

Like there's a difference between receiving something and actually like understanding the implications.

Yes, and you have to check that.

You have to make sure that the person you're communicating with understands what you wanted them to say, or rather what you wanted to say to them.

And even at that point, there's still no promise or guarantee that they'll get back to you in the same way or form that you are expecting.

mean, ideally they would if it's a business, but that's not always a promise.

But also like things happen if you send a message at 4.55 PM on a Friday and everybody's going home and you expect a response in an hour, that's probably not happening.

I should say, I apologize, I think I've been unclear.

I don't mean that you need to get a literal acknowledgement in the sense of, you you've communicated something and someone sends back like, yes, I got it, know, message received.

What I mean is part of the process of communication involves validating that the communication was received, not in the direct immediate response sense, but check back in

a week.

look at the work output someone's generating and see if it accords with what you were trying to tell them.

Ask them the next day, like, did that make sense, what I was saying?

You need to round trip that communication.

You need to make sure that you've correctly induced in their mind the thing that you want them to understand.

It's not enough to say it.

You have to validate that they heard you through whatever means that winds up being.

Look at before and after.

that resonates with me a lot and that makes a ton of sense.

And that's something that I'm still learning about as far as being able to follow up or follow through on.

If I do tell somebody something, do things change in the way that I expect it to or do they change at all?

Yeah, early in my career, so I like to write.

I have some facility with it.

I did an English minor in college.

writing is something I bring to the table as a technologist, an engineer.

And early in my career, I would write a ton.

I would write documents and I would write product plans and requirements, know, RFCs and all that.

And a lot of times I'd write it and people just say like, yeah, okay, whatever.

and no one would ever read it.

So I had to understand that it doesn't really matter.

Like I was putting a ton of effort to communicate through these written documents and I wasn't putting in any effort to make sure that the communication was received by their

intended audience.

So I had to follow up and ask people to review.

I had to schedule meetings and make people sit and read the document live in front of me to make sure it got into their heads.

I had to ask people to make derivatives or make changes or read through this document and make Jira tickets out of it or whatever it was.

But I had to follow up and make sure that the communication that I was intending to make was actually getting where it was supposed to be.

It's the process through which change happens, or at least a process through which some change that you need to make happens.

This has been an incredible conversation and I have learned a lot that I'm gonna take away with for my own career.

Adam, if people wanna connect with you or find you on the web, where can they do that?

you know, I don't have all that much of a web presence.

I have a blog I write on occasionally.

it's handyman5.github.io.

I don't even have my own domain.

I'm a slacker.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

And if it's free GitHub domain, free GitHub domain.

Nothing to complain about there.

it was fun to build all of the stuff to like, as soon as I write the new file, like GitHub Actions automatically takes it and creates and publishes the page and adds the Blue Sky

link and all.

So it was more of a fun project there and a way to document the things I'm working on.

But it is, there exists.

And I'm on Blue Sky at...

I have no idea.

ComptonA.BSky.Social

I will make sure that all the links are available in the show notes, wherever this is distributed.

Adam, thank you so much for a really honest and awesome conversation.

I learned a lot and I'm hopeful that folks listening did too.

Thank you so much.

Sure, thank you for having me.

I hope it winds up being useful for somebody.