Comment Re:Asperger syndrome (Score 3, Interesting) 574
I wonder how many of these people have an autism spectrum disorder. An interviewer might get so put off by a candidate's lack of superficial social skills that he or she cannot adequately judge the candidate's competency for the job itself.
Aspberger/HFA "sufferer" here, who also happens to be the team leader of a consulting group.
Probably quite a few of the "brilliant" coders fall into the HFA category (High Functioning Autism, the "other name" for Aspergers now that it is a number on the ASD scale, or is it a different condition? Great question for starting a fight in a room full of cognitive psychologists...), and we can be a nightmare to integrate into a team - the lack of social skills hampers the ability to communicate and co-ordinate with other team members.
There are some things that are hard to teach effectively - team-working and critical thinking skills being the two most relevant in the environments I work in. If a candidate has those two and if I can see that from a CV and interview and a bonus of self-discipline and motivation, then I almost ignore what functional experience they have with systems, they have the job. It will take weeks or at most months to train them in the systems and applications, but getting the world's best coder in, who can write Tetris in a single line of Basic code or solve NP hard problems in their head is useless if they cannot work with the rest of their colleagues.