Let me just state that like people with autism I have a mental illness that affects the social part of my brain. It makes it hard to make friends as I lack people and social skills. It gave me an advantage to make me high functioning enough to learn programming at a young age and work with math and science better than average.
I am not a mean person, when people get to know me I am nice. But I have few friends because I lack social and people skills. I cannot seem to emotionally connect with people and what friends I have are also with a high IQ that I connect to intellectually.
When I worked, I worked with some mean people. They found high functioning coworkers of mine and pretended to be their friend and then stabbed them in the back and forced them to quit because they were competition. They took credit for their work and then decided to target me next. Calling me a nerd and geek, making fun of me, bullying and harassing me even with threats of violence trying to force me to quit. I ended up stressed out and developed a mental illness and was forced on disability.
Based on Linkedin those mean people who did all of that still have their jobs. They have social skills and people skills and use it to manipulate people, and then black-stab them and climb the corporate ladder of success. Until they make it to management where they can bully and harass people to do their jobs. All the while keeping their dark side hidden.
If you ever worked for Steve Jobs, you would say he was a jerk, he was abusive to his engineers to get things done just right. He had anger problems too. But he had the social skills and people skills to be well liked. There are a lot of people like Steve Jobs out there.
I'll most likely never work again due to my mental illness, but I am not a mean person, I don't treat people with disrespect, I don't bully and harass them. But due to lacking people and social skills, I'll never have enough friends to become a success.
After 911 there is a medical background check, once a company learns I am mentally ill I get the rejection letter that says "overqualified" that rejects me.
I had a hard time trying to find work, with a history of being mentally ill on the records and my background. Most people hide it and don't see a doctor and go undiganosed because of the social stigmas of being mentally ill.
I happen to suffer from schizoaffective disorder which is rare less than .05% of the population has it. It is like bipolar and schizophrenia combined.
When I did have a job as soon as they learned I was mentally ill from my communications, I was bullied, harassed, and picked on, and then eventually fired when I had a panic attack from the stress.
I am sure if I found the right company that wouldn't treat me that way or understand mentally ill people and don't let their employees pick on, bully, and harass them.
I used to earn $150K/year as a programmer, but now they say that is too much money to trust to a mentally ill person. In all honesty it was never about the money, I just loved programming and happened to become good at it in Visual BASIC and Active Server Pages, which are 13+ years out of date now. But I still try to keep up and learn.
My wife doesn't want me to relocate, or else I've have worked for Google in 1999, and I might have avoided the stresses I had that made me mentally ill in 2001. So I am sort of stuck in St. Louis MO and what companies there are here to work that don't like mentally ill people working for them. We tend to drive up health care costs for their insurance and when they think of disabled people they think of people in wheelchairs not the mentally ill. They tried to justify firing be by having a software contractor work $100/hr to do my job while I was in a hospital claiming that none of my coworkers could operate at my level of work. This fits the undue hardship clause of the employment law.
I had about three employers do that to me in a row, and my doctor put me on disability because I couldn't get a stable job.
I was usually hired to debug software to get a company to the next level. I optimized ADO recordsets, SQL Server tables and stored procedures, optimized Crystal Reports reports, and fixed broken Visual BASIC code so it wouldn't crash the machine and it runs faster. I also did web development in Active Server Pages using VBScript and HTML and CSS and JavaScript.
But like I said, no company wants to hire me now, and if they did it would only be temporary to use me to get to the next level and then fire me after I got them there. I feel like a third stage rocket booster.
I am not a mean person, when people get to know me I am nice. But I have few friends because I lack social and people skills. I cannot seem to emotionally connect with people and what friends I have are also with a high IQ that I connect to intellectually.
When I worked, I worked with some mean people. They found high functioning coworkers of mine and pretended to be their friend and then stabbed them in the back and forced them to quit because they were competition. They took credit for their work and then decided to target me next. Calling me a nerd and geek, making fun of me, bullying and harassing me even with threats of violence trying to force me to quit. I ended up stressed out and developed a mental illness and was forced on disability.
Based on Linkedin those mean people who did all of that still have their jobs. They have social skills and people skills and use it to manipulate people, and then black-stab them and climb the corporate ladder of success. Until they make it to management where they can bully and harass people to do their jobs. All the while keeping their dark side hidden.
If you ever worked for Steve Jobs, you would say he was a jerk, he was abusive to his engineers to get things done just right. He had anger problems too. But he had the social skills and people skills to be well liked. There are a lot of people like Steve Jobs out there.
I'll most likely never work again due to my mental illness, but I am not a mean person, I don't treat people with disrespect, I don't bully and harass them. But due to lacking people and social skills, I'll never have enough friends to become a success.