It seems to me that people with Asperger Syndrome have a clear career path:<p>* they would probably prefer to work by themselves on a computer all day<p>* they would probably NOT want to climb the corporate ladder in a large company<p>So, it seems that working on their own computer-related startup would be ideal. And today, that sort of thing is becoming quite common.<p>BTW, it's not clear to me that people with this condition would want to be cured. This "disease" allows people to focus on the task at hand and be more successful at it.<p>In fact, we may be seeing evolution at work here as the human race adapts to the computer age -- at least in certain regions such as Silicon Valley.
I actually have Asperger Syndrome and I'm a programmer. I was diagnosed by a neurologist in 2008 at the age of 34. There are some interesting comments here. I definitely have seen a few comments from other autistic people on forums about preferring a "menial" job if it meant they could work more or less alone. Some would rather be a filing clerk than a manager in the same department. Many of them do well in academics.<p>Simon Baron-Cohen has said that their research indicates a link between autism and systemizing genes. So people who have the systemizing genes are more likely to enter into professions like math, science and software - which is part of the reason why autism is more common among math majors, and why you often see a history of engineering jobs in the family of a person with autism. <a href="http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/research-scientists-more-likely-to-have-autistic-children" rel="nofollow">http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/research-scientists-mo...</a><p>I wrote up some of my thoughts about this in more detail on my blog here: <a href="http://ontap.riaforge.org/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/2/AprilAutism" rel="nofollow">http://ontap.riaforge.org/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/2/AprilAutis...</a><p>I myself am working on raising awareness for an effort to improve the employment rate of people with autism called Autelligent Laboratories. The hope is that the business model for this software company can be extended and reused by companies in other industries. <a href="http://www.autlabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.autlabs.com</a>
This raises some interesting questions--<p>I wonder than if this means Asperger's could at times have been erroneously diagnosed as GADD/social anxiety? How else does stress/anxiety affect patterns of cognition and social function?<p>Would this mean that to the extent it encouraged narrow and driven focus and to the extent such a focus is beneficial, is anxiety/stress actually helpful to society? Does this explain (to some extent) success of societies with high-stress education systems?<p>Interesting find.