Career opportunities, career limitations

Grandin has compiled a list of jobs and their suitability to Aspies and autistics according to their skills. No surprise, tech jobs are cited early and often. Her list of "good jobs for visual thinkers," for example, includes computer programming, drafting (including computer-aided drafting), computer troubleshooting and repair, Web page design, video game design and computer animation.

Grandin's "good jobs for nonvisual thinkers," which she further defines as "those who are good at math, music or facts," includes computer programming, engineering, inventory control and physics.

Why do Asperger's individuals gravitate to technology? "Adults with Asperger's have a social naivet that prevents them from understanding how people relate. What draws them in is not parties and social interaction, but work that allows them to feel safe, to feel in control," explains Steve Becker, a developmental disabilities therapist at Becker & Associates, a private practice in the US that conducts ongoing small group sessions for adults with AS, among other services.

"What's better for that than a video game or a software program?" Becker asks. "When you're designing a software program, there are rules and protocols to be followed. In life, there is no manual."

While careful to protect his clients' confidentiality, Becker confirms that he sees many adults and children of adults who work for the region's tech powerhouses -- Microsoft and Boeing -- and the hundreds of smaller companies that orbit around them.

Some of the Aspies he counsels are at the very top of their tech game: software and aerospace engineers, computer scientists, PhDs. But for every research fellow with Asperger's, he says, there are a legion of fellow Aspies having a much tougher time in the middle or low ranks of the industry.

"The spectrum of success is much broader than one would expect," agrees Roger Meyer, the US-based author of The Asperger Syndrome Employment Workbook who runs one of the oldest peer-led adult Asperger's groups in the country. "Adults who have grown sophisticated at masking and adaptive behaviors can either bubble along at the bottom of the market or do very well at the top."

It's that "bubbling along at the bottom" that has Becker, Meyer and other Aspie specialists concerned. Employees with Asperger's might do well for years in data entry or working in a job like insurance claims, where knowledge of ephemera is a prized work skill, only to flounder when they're promoted to a position that requires a higher degree of social interaction.

"The more technical the job, the better they do. But for some, managing people in a supervisory capacity can be a problem," Becker says.

That can leave Asperger's employees stuck on the lower and less remunerative ranks of IT, sometimes in jobs that are vulnerable to outsourcing, says Meyer. For example, certain tech support situations, where sensory distractions are minimal and human interactions are reduced to a screen or a voice on the phone, are a natural fit for some Aspies.

"They're good at diagnostic work. They can get in and slosh around in the computer, use their encyclopedic knowledge of applications and work-arounds, and arrive at a solution that may be unorthodox but effective," says Meyer. As those jobs increasingly become automated and/or outsourced, Aspies' chances for employment are diminished as well.