UnNews:Microsoft to hire autistic workers
| We distort, you deride | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Saturday, April 20, 2024, 09:55:59 (UTC) |
| Microsoft to hire autistic workers | 
|
6 April 2015
REDMOND, Washington -- Microsoft announced a new initiative to hire more autistic employees for full-time jobs at corporate headquarters here.
The move was revealed in a blog by Mary Ellen Smith, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Diversity. She wrote, "the autistic bring strengths that we need at Microsoft ... some have an amazing ability to retain information" — as opposed to disclosing it to customers.
Ms. Smith envisions putting the autistic to work at the HelpDesk. A typical Windows 8 user who simply wants to avoid the new Metrosexual interface, in which the screen is covered with CHECK ENGINE buttons, and get back to the desktop to do actual work, could endure a drama-filled half hour with a customer service agent using made-up words to describe his years of being persecuted just for being different, when in fact it is everyone else who is different.
Microsoft will collaborate with Specialicisterne, a Danish company that matches autistic workers with jobs that require great attention to detail, such as defusing unexploded bombs, and watching snow melt and reporting on whether there are any spots that the sun missed.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel noted that the effort could produce not just "code coolies" but budding executives. He said, "many successful entrepreneurs suffer from a mild form of Asperger's where you're missing the socialization gene," also the self-discipline gene, and the entire chromosome for working-as-a-team. He said Ms. Smith deserves a hefty bonus for her realization that Microsoft does not yet employ a sufficient number of nerds. He said he was about to tell her so himself, but was waiting for her to finish twirling in a circle three hundred times.
Sources[edit]
- Jena McGregor "Microsoft launches a pilot program for hiring autistic workers". Washington Post, April 6, 2015