How Neurodivergent Brains Build Better Systems

A former manager once described me as a “purist”. It wasn’t the first time a colleague alluded to my obsessive way of thinking but it was the first time someone used it as a compliment. It got me thinking, what if neurodivergent “defects” are the exact architecture the world’s systems need?

Neurodivergence is often pathologized. You may have heard that you’re too rigid, too blunt, too obsessive. These traits may irk humans. I know my friends and family have the patience of a saint for putting up with my idiosyncrasies. Systems are different. I have built and worked on some of the strangest, most exquisite, and highly scalable systems in software. Those systems were masterful because they were built by rigid, obsessive, and blunt people. Those traits build stable infrastructure, write clean code, and destroy inefficiencies in systems.

Trait 1: Systems Thinking

Neurotypical people are top-down thinkers. They have a hypothesis first then obtain data to support or disprove the hypothesis.

Neurodivergent people are bottom-up thinkers. They begin collecting relevant data first then form their hypothesis or “big picture” later.

Business-facing roles present a strong case for neurotypical people but, as always, creative fields, including software engineering, flip the script. I once managed a team shipping some production code to a customer on a horrendous deadline. It was the final day and we were wrapping up our systems integration tests. A bit after 6PM with the midnight deadline looming and my finger hovering over the deploy button, one of the quietest, shyest engineers I’ve ever managed interrupted me mid-speech and said “Wait, we can’t deploy this yet.” He noticed something that his peers had missed and it saved us from destroying our reputation with the customer.

There was a particular button on the user interface that bugged him. It bugged him because it was a slightly different shade of green in the screenshots than it was in the staging environment. The team looked into it, and sure enough, we had tested a slightly older version of the software, not the exact version we nearly shipped to the customer. He saw and noticed the button but what would have been deployed would have had multiple bugs in the code that weren’t visible and passing because the tests were on the old version too. That’s bottom-up thinking.

Trait 2: Hyperfocus and Flow

We live in a distraction economy. Nearly everything in the modern world seeks to rob our focus and divide it among a million shallow things.

Neurodivergent people don’t focus, they obsess. This is a rare skill in these times. I have met neurodivergent people who have created their own programming language and composed and recorded full albums worth of music in just a week.

Elite engineering cultures are built on this kind of focus. I know of one neurodivergent friendly office with a 5-day in office policy. It is an open office but there is a monk-like observance of silence out on the floor. The lighting is warm colored, diffuse, and extremely dim. All meetings are taken in either a soundproof phone booth or a conference room. The cafeteria is in an entirely separate building from where the engineering work is done so there’s no risk of smells carrying over. Desks are arranged in pods of four facing outward so no one sits directly across from another person. Each desk has a high-backed chair and adjustable privacy panels that can create a semi-enclosed workspace. It’s no surprise that these offices enable some of the most elite engineers to write superior code.

Most offices mess this up really badly by having harsh lighting, extremely loud conditions, and gross smells. That kind of environment makes hyperfocus impossible and thus yields middling code.

Trait 3: Automation Instinct

Manual repetitive process can be extremely disruptive and frustrating for neurodivergent employees.

Imagine that you have the power to type characters into a machine that then does things automatically for you 24/7 at a scale of millions, billions, or just about whatever scale you ask it to. You have that power, and then someone tells you to manually enter numbers that you fetch from one system into a spreadsheet in another system. Once? Fine, there’s always going to be some grunt work. If this becomes the norm though, neurodivergent employees will resent the work.

That resentment is valuable to leaders who know how to capitalize on it. Neurodivergent engineers have a lower tolerance for bullshit, which means they automate sooner. What looks like impatience is actually a forcing function for compound productivity gains. The neurotypical employee will tolerate the manual process for months. The neurodivergent employee will spend three days automating it in week one, then reap the efficiency dividend for years.

Companies can capture this by cutting any manual non-specialist process that is necessary and then cutting 90% of the ones that “are necessary”. 9% of the remaining processes should be automated with a dedicated team or teams to build and maintain these automations. The remaining 1% of truly human-necessary, non-specialist processes can then be groaned through and completed by neurodivergent employees with an acceptable minimum disruption to their flow.

If you don’t have neurodivergent people in the leadership looking out for these opportunities for redundancy elimination in your non-specialist processes—anything involving a spreadsheet, most things involving an intranet or internal applications, anything that most employees are likely to just click through without reading—you’ll never notice them and fix them and you’ll leave a ton of work output on the table.

If you want good ROI in software you will aggressively find and reduce this grunt work for your people. The only way you can do that is by having at least a few neurodivergent executives at the helm. I can tell you from experience, when this voice isn’t represented in a C-suite neurodivergent people burn out which ultimately costs the company untold big bucks.

The Collision

So if neurodivergent traits produce superior infrastructure, elite code, and automation dividends, why aren’t companies optimizing for them?

The legacy corporate environment has evolved to suit neurotypical workers. When I was young, my father had an office at his job with an opaque door that closed. He didn’t have a fancy MBA or advanced degree, just his associates. He didn’t work in a major US city, we were in the Rust Belt. Fast forward to today, workers even with a Director or “Head of” title, working in some of the most affluent cities in the US, with advanced degrees sit in a noisy open office. If you are very lucky you might have an assigned desk. Most offices have embraced hot-desking. If you have an office you can be sure that there are windows for passers-by to peer into. You are not entitled to your own space nor privacy unless you are a member of the lauded C-suite. Penny wise, pound foolish, and outright classist.

Presenteeism is held in very high regard in a corporate office. If you aren’t in the office how can your leaders know that you are working? I once worked with a peer leader at an organization with a 3-day in-office requirement. He boasted that he always came in four days a week. He proudly stated this fact to me on more than one occasion, presumably waiting for his Goodest Boy trophy. This kind of mentality prioritizes optics over throughput, and the damage is compounds. Perfect Attendance Man backs other perfect attendance people because if their subject matter acumen is challenged by someone competent, everybody will see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Keep rewarding optics over years and you foster an environment that purges competent individuals from leadership.

As long as corporate environments maintain this setup, they are leaving massive value on the table as their neurodivergent workers fight through the day to survive and not burn out entirely.

What Works

Here’s what neurodivergent-optimized engineering orgs need:

1. Remote-first

Not always possible for all companies (hardware, security classifications, etc.) Almost always possible outside of those factors though.

Executives who need to see people working to know that they’re working should ask themselves whether that work produces anything of tangible value. Worth noting that these executives always have large, dedicated, private offices with an opaque door that shuts while their employees don’t even have assigned desks. I worked in one of these “hot-desking” setups and had my $300 keyboard stolen within a matter of months.

2. Cultural Discipline

If two coworkers begin to chat loudly at their desks, soon it will be four, then eight. In just a short amount of time there will always be chatter and movement on the floor. It must be made abundantly clear that a library-like atmosphere is to be observed in the working areas. It’s counterproductive to do this with rules. The loudest office I ever worked in has signs reminding employees to be quiet in worker areas. The quietest office didn’t need signs, it was built into the culture. Your early and influential hires must establish the norm in your organization’s culture that it’s really frowned upon to disrupt people while they’re in focus.

3. Neurodivergent Representation

Executive leadership is heavily biased towards neurotypical people. They can socialize extensively, aren’t sensitive to noises or lights, thrive in the presentation and optics that define executive culture. But neurotypical-only leadership rarely builds cultures that achieve technical excellence.

Whenever I have seen neurodivergent folks on an exec team, their company is breaking records, forging new technology previously thought impossible, and making a lot of money. That representation matters because those executives notice and eliminate the inefficiencies that neurotypical leadership doesn’t even see as problems.