Knowing a LOT about your chosen career

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It has recently come to my attention that being enthusiastic about one's job and actively learning as much as possible about said career is sometimes seen as negative socially.

I don't plan on making any major changes, but I wouldn't mind navigating around someone else's past mistakes.

My boss sees my enthusiasm and knowledge as a positive. However, things are sometimes weird between myself and my closest supervisor. I know she is sensitive to me respecting her authority and I seem to usually be able to either let something go that is incorrect or fix it with minimal upset (I think).

Since digging into one topic relentlessly is so common for folks on the spectrum, I was curious how other people navigated this.

I understand perfectly what you mean.

As a default, I would stay quite interested in my work, regardless of how your immediate supervisor feels about it. I, myself, would fall head-over-heels with a woman who was interested in what she was doing--especially if it involved something of an intellectual nature.

I've gotten flak for this--but hey, I'm still at my job almost 34 years later, looking forward to a pension in 8 1/3 years.

I actually have just the opposite problem. Most of the NTs in my field seem to be fairly interested in their work as well as broader events in our industry. Whereas most days I struggle to stay focused on it for more than even a few hours (due to, I suspect, the combined influence of my circumscribed interests and some executive dysfunction). I stay in it because it's good pay and places relatively low demands on my time. If money weren't an issue though, I'd probably choose to do just about anything else with my time.

I am the head of a multi-disciplinary engineering team. My boss (a VP), while an engineer, is much more focused on the mgmt side of things.

While he looks to me for expertise and professional opinion he also expects (and rightly so) my support and an understanding of the issues and challenges he faces in the higher corporate circles he has to negotiate. At the end of the day I try to brief him as best I can, give him all the options along with the pros and cons of each, and my recommendation - but once he makes a decision he expects from me - and gets - my support (even if it isn't the choice I would have made).

I've always found that keeping things friendly but professional works best - keeps personal issues out of the equation.

I like that, Egghead. Very sage and Adlai Stevenson of you!

I am a cook, and have a very deep and broad knowledge of most things food related, some people hate it, some people love it. Usually my boss likes it as I let them take credit for a good idea and I work hard, but people seem to struggle sometimes when I talk about the Rockwell hardness of their knives for 3 hours and such like, but in the same vein I rather dislike having to listen to 3 hours of discussions about their sporting team.

I couldn't afford NOT to know a lot about my job.

Most of what I do relies on scientific knowledge being used for compassionate purposes.
If I didn't have sound knowledge of the how and why things are I could not practice with the degree of safety that I do.
People's lives are too precious to leave in the hands of someone who doesn't know their stuff.

I think a problem can be that you know a lot (and voraciously consume information about) the field that you are interested in, rather than the specific job that you have.

This can mean that you have learned best practices or cutting edge techniques that are not part of the institutional culture of your employer.

Then when you suggest the obviously better way of doing things, you rub everyone the wrong way, most particularly your immediate supervisors.

Speaking from experience, this is a particularly bad thing to do at a staff meeting or in another very public situation.

A better approach, if you want to share the deep information you have about the field and find ways to apply it at work, is to ask for a one-on-one meeting (maybe a lunch/breakfast/ or coffee break) with your supervisor and say you have been learning about some cool new stuff and want to discuss. Then you may learn something about all the weird institutional reasons why they do things in the way that do at the job, and you may influence the boss to propose some positive change.

I think this is the probem you are talking about: am I right?