An alternative employment model for autistic programmers?

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Here, in the thread What would make this feel like the "right planet" for you?, I wrote:

Moving this here to the "Work and finding a Job" area.

That could be nice. Are you working on any open source projects?

Having some sort of coaching and counseling with an understanding of software work would be great too.

I've been intermittently working on a soon-to-be open source project that my partner and I are not yet ready to share with the public or invite other people to help with.

At some point, my partner and I will come up with a list of suggestions for other open-source projects that other people could work on.

In the meantime, the most important question now is what would be good first organizational steps toward my vision as expressed in the original post.

I'm considering trying to organize a group of autistic programmers here in NYC. The group as I now envision it would include programmers who work, or want to work, in the mainstream corporate world, as well as those interested in the alternative employment model I've proposed. Perhaps the group could also have a mostly-NT "family and friends auxiliary," or something like that, who could hopefully help out with building the organization and reaching out to the business world.

At some point it would also be good to create an online forum in which various kinds of coaching and counseling could take place. The forum need not be limited to a particular geographic area, but could have geographic-based sub-forums to facilitate the work of local geographic-based organizations such as the one I'm considering trying to start in NYC.

What do you think?

That sounds kind of like auticon.us though I don't know much about them.


Yeah, it's best to have one communications person in a consulting group. I read a post on news.ycombinator about how programmers communicating directly with the client can cause problems and a lot of stress if the client is unreasonable, so it's best to have one person dedicated to this.

It's been easier for me to find motivation meeting in person than staying holed up in my room, but a cool, useful, rewarding enough project for which I can't make many excuses not to work on would be great.