Question for those in IT

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I've been thinking of entering the IT field and just wanted to ask, for those of you who are/have been in this field, has it been enjoyable as a career path?

Specifically, for the Aspies among you who experience social confusion and sensory sensitivity in the workplace, what has it been like working as a software developer or programmer, for example?

I've heard the best programmers take great pains to ensure they're not being repetitive in code writing, and working out short-cuts; how does this work for the person on the autism spectrum, like me, who likes doing repetitive things? Is it different from doing repetitive things in everyday life?

I really need some insight on this; I really love this area but I have no idea if it would be right for me, or what the workplace is like and if there are lots of opportunities to work alone or part-time in the office and part-time from home. Also, what the office politics are like. Anyone care to talk about their experience?

Hello,

I'm based on the UK so I can only talk about what it's like in the Uk. I started out self employed / freelancing then I joined the BBC. I've been at the BBC about 6 years now working as a developer, senior developer and currently a senior accsessbility specialist.

I have found IT to be a good place for me. The repetition is around solving similar problems using similar tools rather than doing the same action over and over. That said, in my work there is lots of repeatability for things like manual testing.

If you like repeating things perhaps looking at being a software tester might be a good start. I know a bunch of aspies who work in software quality assurance etc.

My background is in IT, although I did succeed in college, jobs have now evolved and require various certifications and experience in a certain field like accounting. They also require degrees at which point is impossible for me to attain for reasons that would take a while to explain. At the time (few years back) I was assured by my lecturer that employers would be fighting over me to be their employee, but take a few steps forward into the future and the bar has been raised, and your future in IT is thrown out of the window. You suggest software testing, every software testing job requires a degree, scratch that, every job that has 'software' or 'engineer' requires a degree and I don't have one.

Courses/certificated require money which I don't have, self-employment is pretty much obsolete now that every idea has been thought up as well as the fact that I have a limited creativity/imagination, volunteering at a job an hour away from home would not be feasible financially (I say this because to get in most IT entry-level jobs you need 1+ year experience and volunteering is pretty much the only way in). It is very luck based, if you don't have connections that is.

You are very smart for feeling this out before you enter the field. I wish I would have known about my options. I ended up just going with what life brought me and ended up where I am now. If I had it to do over again and had access to data the way people do today I certainly would have ended up in a different place.

I started out back in 1982 when I was 12 writing my own programs in Basic on an older Tandy computer that had nothing except basic. I had to save my work to a tape recorder. LOL ! !! I spent my free time writing my own games. They were simple but logic based. One game was a combination number guessing that made it look like you were trying to break into a safe ((A box on the screen with the digit holders inside that graphic) before the bomb went off ((Red lines coming out in every direction if you did not get the code right in a certain number of tried.)) If you got it right you were rewarding with golden round circles flying out of the box instead. You could select the difficulty and that would determine the number of places in the combination.

Anyway, I can still see that code in my head. Learning HOW to write the code and how to organize the structure was a HIGH for me. I did not need friends or their drugs. I just needed my bedroom and my code. Wow. That was paradise.

When I went to college I ended up following the education path. I had no idea computer science was an option. I did all that in the background as a hobby. I became good at it and fell into the line of supporting others on the computers. Ended up with an IT job on a helpdesk with a focus on teachers in a small company. I had certain things I knew I needed (I could NOT do any oncall work as it messed me up with routines). They told me that was fine. I was the very best and my customers adored me. And I loved my job... for about 8 years...

Then things started getting silly as the company grew. They added products and gave us no instruction on how to support them. They made changes all the time and expected me to just be able to do the same level of work as I had always done. I had NO CLUE about autism ... all I knew is that everything changing was destroying my soul and mind. I was very suicidal. I had a major burnout and that is when I started to see a therapist and ended up with an official DX of ASD. Everything finally made sense to me.

I have now been in the same job for 16 years. I still love my customers and enjoy hyper focus tech talk with them about subjects I know and can help them fix. But now I am in a situation of WAY TOO MUCH NOISE in the helpdesk world. They continue to make MASSIVE changes to the tools we use to do our jobs and each change causes me to go into self harm and the autism overload stuff. It is torture inside my universe. But I hate change so much that I just stay and suffer. I have thought about trying to figure out how to code once again so I could get a job where I could hide away in a dark silent corner of the world and play with logic for a living... but almost every job in IT now wants people to be on-call. I CAN'T do that.

So I am stuck.

Whatever you want to go into just try to visualize what your job will be like in 20 years. Will you still want to be doing it? I think for us on the spectrum we do not pick our jobs... who we are determines what we should do for a living... we end up choosing our lives instead of our employment.

I'm also in the UK, but it doesn't matter about perspective, though I wouldn't want to work in a place like BBC with all the camera's around (i'm what you call a camera-shy person). I've also heard of specialisterne where I think they stopped taking in people, but I wouldn't have performed at a good standard since my programming skills (if that what software testing really involves) are pretty non-existent, the penny didn't really drop for me as the saying goes. It has been a few years since I left education so most IT knowledge has rubbed off by now.

My eye's haven't really been opened up on the world of self-employment, my knowledge only goes so far as start-up companies, having a business idea and putting together a team of e.g. accountant, sales person, graphic/technical artist, project manager, taking out a loan etc.

I have experience giving IT technical support, but this is just very basic knowledge, like the visual stuff that people have problems with, i'd fail on the first day of a 1st/2nd/3rd line tech support job, and my phone manner is just the worst. So dealing with customers has long been a turn-off for me in terms of what jobs are out there and that doesn't leave me with many to apply for. This isn't negativity speaking this is just my experience in IT and the business world.