S24:E2 - Understanding and Supporting Neurodivergence in Tech (Frankie Nicoletti)

Saron sits down again with Frankie Nicoletti who we heard from in Season 23. This time Saron and Frankie talk about neurodivergence. They talk about what neurodivergence is, how listening to people's needs and making accommodations to allow people to do their best work is and will always be good for everyone, not just those who are neurodivergent, and the benefits of being neurodivergent. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity Laziness Does Not Exist Loom Dyslexia Bottom-up thinking Autism ADHD Neurodivergence

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about neurodivergence with the familiar voice we have on Season 23, Frankie Nicoletti, VP of Engineering at SoLo Funds.

[00:00:21] FN: All these things are good for everyone. Listening to people when they give you their needs, good for everyone. Making accommodations to allow people to do their best work, good for everyone. Reducing people’s unnecessary cognitive load so that they can spend their precious time and energy while they’re at work on business problems is good for everyone. And I think that that’s really at the core of the sort of neurodivergent movement for me is that everything is all connected.

[00:00:46] SY: Frankie talks about what neurodivergence is and how to be more accommodating in the workplace after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:59] SY: Thank you so much for being here again.

[00:01:01] FN: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be back.

[00:01:03] SY: So for those of you who didn’t have a chance to listen to Frankie’s previous episode, Frankie came on our show in Season 23 and we got a chance to talk about Frankie’s tech journey. So for this episode, we’re going to talk about neurodivergence. Does that sound good to you?

[00:01:15] FN: Let’s do it.

[00:01:16] SY: Allrighty. So can you define what neurodivergence means?

[00:01:22] FN: Yeah. Neurodivergence is super interesting. You’ll hear a lot of people talk about neurodivergence, like plural, versus neurotypicals, but actually, I think there’s so much we don’t know about how the brain works, and I would imagine that everyone’s brain is actually a little more different from the “norm”, and maybe there isn’t a norm that exists, but most commonly when you hear people talk about neurodivergence, especially at work, they’re talking about conditions that we know as things like ADHD, autism, OCD, dyslexia, all of these kinds of things. Even down to things like there are certain conditions that affect whether you can visualize things in your brain, whether you could see images, or whether you just like think in concepts. But the point is that we’re all very different and some of these types of brains do better in a standard office environment than others.

[00:02:12] SY: Tell me a little bit more about some examples of neurodivergence. I think ADHD is probably the one that comes most top of mind. What are some other ones that we should be aware of?

[00:02:22] FN: Yeah. Autism is a big one. There’s a high comorbidity, which is a very serious sounding word between autism and ADHD, which basically means that it’s very likely for someone who has one to also have the other, and we know ADHD as being either a dopamine deficiency or executive dysfunction, it might also come with time blindness. Autism has some overlap with things that might look like OCD, where people who are autistic like things to be very organized. They tend to have bottoms up instead of top down thinking, which makes them really great at designing systems. Like you’ll find a lot of engineers. I don’t have any statistics to prove this. It’s just my suspicion from my personal experience is that there are a lot of people that work in tech who are autistic, who are bottoms-up thinkers, and that can make them really good at their job. But there’s also things like dyslexia. And a lot of people with dyslexia, which people understand as, “Oh, you’re jumbling up letters,” but did you know that the reason people with dyslexia jumble up letters is because bees and peas and bees, they’re so good at visualizing things that they look like the same letter?

[00:03:26] SY: Ha! That’s interesting.

[00:03:28] FN: This is why Comic Sans is a super inclusive font for people with dyslexia because every letter is different. They’re not shaped the same, rotated different ways. There’s many people with dyslexia who have this incredible ability to visualize things in 3D that blows past what the average person can do, which can make them really good at things that involve like architecture or things that involve a need to visualize something to just a greater degree than what most of the rest of us can do. And that’s a very common one. There’s other ones where people have trouble visualizing something in their brain. They think in words. For folks like that, like one of the things that’s good is having really good database documentation that’s written out on paper so that they don’t have to imagine the database connections in their brain, but there’s certainly a wide variety. OCD is a neurodivergence. Even things like traumatic brain injury actually count as under neurodivergence as well because it causes your brain to work in different ways. And traumatic brain injuries are all different, right? I can’t say that every person with a brain injury needs X, Y, Z accommodation at work, but just know that we think about them when we’re thinking about how to make the workplace more inclusive too.

[00:04:33] SY: I think one of the struggles with trying to be inclusive when it comes to neurodivergence, trying to be inclusive in the workplace and thinking about either a manager and the person they’re managing or just between coworkers, is that it’s not like visible, right? Like it’s not something that people wear on their shirt. So it might be hard to kind of identify, is this person dealing with some obstacles, some issues around being neurodivergent? Or is it something unrelated to that? Is there a way to be sensitive if you’re just not sure and just not made aware of that person? How do you help someone if you don’t know what they’re dealing with?

[00:05:11] FN: Yeah. I love this question. And there’s a bunch of different components to the answer, one of which that it is invisible and I subscribe to the social model of disability, which is that like I’m only as disabled as I’m not accommodated by society. For example, we don’t think about eyeglasses as being a disability aid, but they are.

[00:05:31] SY: Interesting. Yeah. Yep.

[00:05:33] FN: And we even joke about how some people look better with glasses on. We’re basically joking about how some people look better with their disability aid.

[00:05:41] SY: Yeah.

[00:05:42] FN: And it’s become totally normalized because every kid gets checked for their vision and they get glasses, and then later they get contacts or I’ve had LASIK eye surgery and we just accept this, like obviously people are going to have their eyes checked at some point and we’re going to do something about it. You are only as “disabled” as society does not accommodate you, or as your workplace doesn’t accommodate you. And I will actually probably make this argument several times over the course of this episode that accommodations that we do for people with neurodivergence actually benefit everyone. They’re just like good practices that make everyone feel safe and cared for and like they have the resources and the support necessary to do the job. The other thing that I will add is that the general thing you should do is listen to people. So if you’re a manager and you have an engineer who’s saying, “Hey, I have ADHD and I’m having trouble with X, Y, Z,” then you can sort of work with them to find like a solution for them for that specific circumstance. I wouldn’t say there aren’t general things you could do to sort of support neurodivergence because I think there are remote work being one of them. But more often than not, the trick here is to listen to people when they tell you what kind of support they need. And the thing that makes this additionally complicated is that there’s plenty of people out there who I think are still undiagnosed. Many people got their n

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