Suggested/Not suggested Jobs for Aspergers.

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I think working as a PA is dreadful. I got channelled into it because I could type and use a PC, and because I was so fast/accurate, had good written English and could help everyone else with their software queries, as I became older and more experienced and the expectation was that I would take more senior roles, I found myself in a completely different sort of job, i.e. PA as opposed to just churning out documents.

I hate it because:
- You're expected to remember every fiddly little detail regarding everything.
- You're expected to juggle umpteen things at once (multitasking).
- Bosses expect their every need to be anticipated, however unexpected.
- You're expected to be not just one jump ahead, but several jumps ahead.
- People give scant or no instructions but you're expected to get the work right anyway. This is euphemistically dubbed "common sense".
- Bosses expect you to be in their face several times a day, asking for work. This is euphemistically dubbed "being proactive". (Never mind how snowed under you might be already with your other bosses' work.)
- In particular young bosses, and especially trainees, have a habit of leaving everything till the last minute and then it becomes YOUR emergency to ensure that a vital deadline is met. They have no compunction about saddling you with work that MUST get done that evening, when it's already 5.15pm. (So you get screamed at by your spouse for saying you won't be home for dinner. Again.)
- People in the company who don't have a clue where to go for resources ("Who deals with...?") ("Where do they sell...?") ("Where do I find information on...?") ask you all sorts of dumb questions and if you don't assume responsibility for knowing/asking someone else/researching the answers, on top of everything else you must get done, there'll be ructions. A lack of time or willingness to deal with these stupid queries is usually framed as "unhelpfulness" or "lack of initiative".
- If you should happen to be super-fast at your assigned tasks, don't think you'll be rewarded for your efficiency by leaving a little earlier. This situation is regarded in the corporate world as "having spare capacity" and you'll just be expected to do everyone else's work during the time you have efficiently created.
- Picking up others' work, that they couldn't/wouldn't/were too busy chatting/were too hung over to do, and which should be nothing to do with you, is necessary if you wish to have the "team player" box checked at your next appraisal.
- Being "support staff", you don't get a sensory-issues friendly space to work. You get dumped in a noisy open-plan area with nasty lighting, feeling exposed/watched by everyone who walks past.
- Constant interruptions: phones, colleagues just walking up (especially when they walk up from behind), constantly changing priorities and tasks that land on your desk that must be done NOW, i.e. before the task you're in the middle of. The constant shifting gears in your head is massively tiring.

I could go on but I've just been interrupted and my train of thought has just been wrecked.

Telemarketing?! No way. Talking on the phone is even more stressful for me than talking face to face.

I really think we have to consider our individual traits.

I have noise aversion, not so good facial recognition, low executive function, clumsiness, bad memory for important things/great memory for trivia no one else cares about; blurting at the wrong moment--the list goes on.

I teach. As others before me have mentioned, this is not easy when dealing with a thousand Aspie issues every day, not to mention all that time around so many different people. Makes me wanna holler!

I think that key is maintaining a low stress level. I've noticed that I do better overall when I am in low stress mode.

Also, I think you have to be prepared to live within the means of your income. if you want to maintain a rich lifestyle, you have to make concessions, regardless of ASDs.

If you can be happy without lots of money and live within your means, find a job around people you can stand and work you can tolerate.

Truth be told, my perfect job is not available: head napper, daydreamer, and food explorer.

Some feedback on jobs I've had:

SUBWAY® Sandwich Artist®
As a teenager I had a strong fascination with Subway and thought "Seafood and Crab" foot-longs were the best thing ever. So I went to work at the nearest one (small city, country atmosphere) when I was 15.

Upsides: I enjoyed the ritualistic aspect of serving people in their preset manner, you start at one end of the counter and then repeat the same set of actions for each. People were pretty well behaved there so the customers weren't a big problem. Also, I gave people *very* generous servings, because at that stage I just thought doing a great job meant giving people what they wanted.

Downsides: Eventually the cheapskate bosses became aware that I was giving people exactly what they wanted, and it wasn't very well received. I hated the stress of using the cash register, and having to clean around people while the restaurant was open, and worry about the soda syrup running out. MOSTLY though, I did not handle the back-end kitchen work AT ALL, and got in trouble several times when left there all by myself because the kitchen would be a disaster after just a few hours.

I wouldn't work there again unless it was just to make sandwiches and that's it. God forbid that anyone should ever order a coffee, also.

Banquet Waiter

I didn't do this for long because I absolutely hated it. The handling of several heavy items, the lack of instruction on how to set out cutlery, the crowded ballroom layout, the mean and boisterous kitchen staff, surly attitudes of guests, late nights drying silverware. Everything about it was horrible, except the higher pay.

Website Designer / General IT Person / Trainer

Upsides: The company I worked at had little for me to do, so a lot of my time I got to spend polishing skills in areas that I thought might be needed soon, like databases or graphics. My boss treated me like his little wizard sidekick, and would regularly arrive back from business meetings with new and interesting things to do (that he'd already sold people on, of course). And the staff was small so I got into a groove with most of them.

Downsides: It was the beginning of a long painful realisation for me that IT is very fashion-oriented, and therefore no amount of study or preparation will ever lead to a steady routine; what to do and how to do it is always changing in subtle or acute ways, and it's maddening. Also, being sent out to interact with clients to either train people to build web pages, or be "service contact" for projects drove me up the wall. I was invariably given out to women as some kind of trinket, so my mimicked behaviour slowly moved more and more toward the feminine, which I was ignorant about totally but upset by nonetheless. Also the internal financial problems of small companies tends to filter down to individual employees a lot harder, I think, so I was under constant pressure to "earn my keep" and was pressured to extend into sales-like activity which is not my thing at all.

Freelance Web Designer

Upsides: It was nice working for someone overseas, because I had no direct supervision and could work when I felt most able like at night time or sketching in quiet restaurants. And the money was quite good. I was creatively challenged and given the opportunity to work in a more artistic field for the first time and it was nice.

Downsides: Although dealing with a single contact and never having customer contact was a plus for the most part, the owner of the company I worked for was quite abrupt and tended to set unrealistic deadlines. The constraint of working on rigidly-constructed problems to be completed in a hurry wore off the benefits of being more visually creative. Plus they extended my role into database development after discovering I had a background in it, and that pretty much ended my enjoyment totally.

IT Journalist

Upsides: Getting published in national and international publications, a sense of responsibility and importance, occasionally getting free stuff like software or trips. Very decent pay.

Downsides: Mimicking the editorial voice of even one publication can be taxing, let alone several. Plus there are many, many unwritten rules about what is expected. The social conundrum of interacting with other people in the business and meeting aggressive deadlines regularly was a killer. Plus, they tend to purchase stories based on "pitches" and "proposals" in publishing, so the initial inspiration tends to be lost by the time something is commissioned, or the game becomes "writing a good pitch" and then spinning them out into full-length articles without changing the premise is computational hell.

Programmer

Upsides: Very, very occasionally, someone from real life actually understands and appreciates what's going on. Working with people on the Internet can mean a freedom to code at night when different time zones are in daylight still. The money can be pretty good. Solving problems well is a point of satisfaction.

Downsides: Again, the fashion aspect. The competitive aspect. The fact that languages and tools aren't perfect ever, so things hardly ever work as expected, or break. Debugging is a huge waste of time. I found that even in the open source world, people are absolute dicks and will often go to great lengths to discredit, downplay, or even emotionally sabotage others.

Those are all the worst jobs I've ever had. Others that were still bad include packing shelves at a small local supermarket (lots of objects to handle into badly-designed spaces, poor instruction and processes), volunteering at a local charity (crazy office politics).

I'm yet to find paid employment that actually suits me that much. Thanks to everyone who posted on this thread though, the stories have helped me a lot.

I had a quite exhausting job several years ago. I was an administrative and recepcionist in a big free health care building saturated of patients and with an important shortage of doctors and nurses (some days that was the chaos). I had to deal with a lot of stress. I studied my career to avoid that, saddly I can't find a job related to my studies so I have to deal with temporary jobs that always include a lot of people.

So working in a free health care building not suggested.

I'm pretty left-brained guy. I must say, I've got it pretty good right now. In the past, I have:

1. Delivered pizza. Hand them the pizza, say something pleasant. The encounter is over in a few seconds.

2. IRS. The US tax agency. Grab a folder of tax returns, follow a series of steps on the computer based on what their problem was. (The computer already knew which tax returns had problems.) They added numbers wrong or forgot their son/daughter's social security number, for instance.

3. A bunch of other stuff, but those two jobs stand out as being pretty good.

Right now, I'm a warehouse clerk at an Internet merchant (a big one. The one you're thinking of.) I've worked my way up to "kind of" a supervisor, but mostly I am not supervising people. I am solving problems with the computer. I sort out problems with incorrect / damaged merchandise. Sometimes I'll HELP people in the building, NOT supervise them (last week I re-printed a UPC label that was faded. If the laser can't read it, we can't ship the item).

If you are like me, I highly recommend "clerking your brains out". The pay is decent. I can "step down" and pick and pack, or even drive a forklift with the proper safety training. But being a clerk using the computer (no customer contact) works well for me, and I enjoy it.

If you can live on stupid wages then cleaning is good. Everyone ignores you if you are the cleaner, you can walk down a corridor and no-one looks you in the eye. Big pair of gloves to stop stuff touching you and you generally don't have to work alongside anyone else.

I work in a quiet kitchen. The lighting is a problem, but if I'm prepping veg or scrubbing pots by the window then its ok. I am assumed to be barely capable of tying my shoelaces by any visitors and am ignored by most If that doesn't work I have pretended to lack the ability to understand much English, in situations where I can get away with it

A really good job I had was bookkeeper, pre-computers, manually working out wages, taxes, stock value etc. I loved that and mostly worked at home.

Then the office girl left, leaving no-one to answer the phone. They gave me a raise to work alone in the office instead of at home, so if the phone rang I could answer it. Big mistake, the phone rang a lot & customers called in looking for the sales people, who would be out selling, not hanging about the office, but then I was expected to help them while telling them nothing about anything. Keep them happy instead of telling them to bog off and let me work. I couldn't concentrate on anything while being interupted all the time, it was hell. I totally broke down with the stress & left.

I teach adult school, but most of my students are in high school. It's good because I teach all high school subjects, so I can use my extensive knowledge, but I have to deal with a bunch of teenagers all day and it's miserable. I am burned out and want to switch careers, but I have no idea what I want to do...and at my age, it's getting late. I know I'd have to go back to school, but it takes so long, and it's too competitive to get into grad school. Plus, my major is worthless (anthropology), so I'd likely have to get another bachelor's degree just to do anything! I know I should be happy I have a job, but I'm so miserable at it that I fantasize about quitting.

Worst job I ever had was working in a "Call Before You Dig" call center. The people I worked with were decent, and some even fun, but having to follow a script and being rushed and timed and recorded all the time (and chewed out if you spent 2 seconds too long with some calls) made me really anxious, and then when stupid people would call and couldn't even answer basic questions about where they were going to dig (which meant I couldn't map the dang area on my computer and move on) then it would take longer to complete the call - which was even more pressure. I lasted a year but it was absolute hell. I quit finally, but I was on the verge of being fired even though the managers liked me and were trying to cover for me.

Best job I ever had was working in a residential group home for DD adults where I was the only staff person present. I quickly learned to like and get along with the folks who lived there, and without the other staff around I didn't have to deal with game playing and such (it was going on, but I wasn't having to see it and deal with it all the time). I still feel I was really stupid to leave that job. It was a lot of housecleaning for the residents, and passing meds (which I hated), and such. A real sh*t job sometimes, literally. But I still wish I was back there. Low stress once I learned it.

i could never be an optometrist.

The best job I've had was in a factory as a machine operator. All I had to do was pick up the work orders for the day, do some minimal delegating with my helper and a few temps, and go off in my corner. It was dirty and physical, but I set my own pace and actually had to use my head occasionally for a change. I moved away from the area, but manufacturing is dying out anyway I guess.