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05 Sep 2020, 5:23 pm

Hello!
My name is Assel Shardarbekova. Although I don't have Autism or Asperger's, I want to help people gain employment based on the special interests that can be turned into job opportunities. I would be happy to hear from you about your experiences and see if this idea will be helpful.


Best,
Assel



Dear_one
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05 Sep 2020, 6:04 pm

"Do what you love, and the money will follow."
This only applies to a narrow range of interests, and generally involves nasty compromises.

I am very much in favour of NTs being trained in how to productively partner with creative technical workers. We would never have heard of Royce if not for Rolls, nor Cray if not for Rollwagen, who cared not for fame. One problem is that good promoters are not usually able to evaluate technical work - they expect a good presentation, not a mind-blowing fact. In particular, the best salesmen will never sell the best product, because what they fear more than failure is hearing their peers say "Well, ANYONE could sell THAT!" They want a chance to show off.
The "Air (powered) Car" managed to fool investors for a decade, even though anyone with gr. 11 physics, or some knowledge of engineering history, should have been able to see that the claims for it were impossible. There seems to be no resource where businessmen can get technical advice. They check with their lawyers, but never their engineers.
I thought that once I had a working prototype, I would be approached by talented managers. On a shoestring budget, I won a world championship, beating many University teams, and demonstrated a radical simplification of vehicle chassis design. Decades later, well-paid researchers are still creeping towards the same result, but I didn't get a single job offer. https://www.compositesworld.com/columns ... le-history
Scott Adams points out that it can take all morning for an engineer to focus in on his job, and that it is common for managers to throw those hours away on "just a quick meeting." Perhaps you could teach a course in "how not to kill the Golden Goose."
Perhaps the hardest part of introducing an improvement is convincing all the Dunning-Kruger cases (almost always a large majority) that it is actually their idea, so they won't gang up on it to preserve their images, based on cheating in school. Corporations HATE ideas "Not Invented Here" and will budget ten times more to break a patent than to pay royalties.



Last edited by Dear_one on 05 Sep 2020, 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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05 Sep 2020, 6:37 pm

All past jobs I have had have been involved in a special interest except for one.


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aquafelix
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06 Sep 2020, 5:32 am

I've been lucky enough to be able to have a special interest as my career, but it's still very hard work managing all the other things that are a part of a job that aren't much interest to me



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06 Sep 2020, 9:17 am

My jobs were both in science. I don't know whether science was a special interest of mine or not - I don't quite fit the stereotype of having one or two interests with rigid boundaries and no interest in anything else whatsoever, I have a few interests that have been like that but I've also been strongly interested in a broader range of things. I was definitely interested in science and figuring out how things worked, and luckily for me there was enough flexibility there for me to take on board the remit my science employers gave me. So maybe my employment record wasn't all that far removed from what might be seen as typical, with regard to subject matter.

I chose to work for universities involved in medical research because that neatly got me out of having to aid and abet the commercial world for which I have little but contempt. I guess that feeling comes from a strong sense of honesty and an idealistic notion that we shouldn't be wasting our energy producing rubbish when there are more important things to do.

In my first job they were very pleased with my performance once they'd realised it was better to let me do things my own way. The second employer wasn't always so wise - I had a lot of freedom compared to most others on my level, but there was the occasional move by management to hammer people into moulds and ignore their individual strengths and weaknesses, which is where they came unstuck.

My advice to employers would be to tailor the job more to the employee's preferences, strengths and weaknesses.

Ideally I'd have been self-employed as a provider of musical services. I nearly had a go at one point, but it never happened. In many ways that would have been better, as I'm more interested in music than science. The problem was that business studies bored me for a long time. Later on I got quite interested in the study of money, but my mind still tends to balk at the bureacratic side of business, all the form-filling etc. I'm also a conscientious objector to marketing, so unless my product sold itself without promotional hype I wouldn't stand a chance.



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06 Sep 2020, 10:50 am

Why do you have a yahoo address as your username?


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maycontainthunder
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06 Sep 2020, 10:56 am

Something smells funny here and it isn't this jester. :jester:

I've tried special interest jobs firstly in a cycle shop, horrible. The second was in a model/hobby shop which drove me try and end my life more than once.

Job in my special interest? NO. WAY.



Dear_one
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08 Sep 2020, 5:01 am

My favourite occupation is silversmithing things less ambitious than teapots. As a job, it barely paid the bills, but I enjoyed it. Much later, I took it up again as a hobby and it helped to get me out of a depression.
My favourite materials are composites, since they can be as efficient as trees in tapering out smoothly, but the better I make them, the less I enjoy the process, and the employment is pretty grim overall.
I'm writing back with a hot tip for all the business weenies who don't know how to evaluate prospective technical partners. Just look for someone getting in the news for their results on a shoestring budget. It's the ol' cost/benefit analysis. I don't know if Dave Cloud was an aspie, but he built an electric car out of junk that beat most of the factory experimental models on range. I don't know what he would have done with a factory budget, but someone could have given him enough money for fresh, new batteries, and some shop gear to see if he needed a manager before tackling bigger stuff.
Alec Brooks had a special interest in electric cars, too, and happened to be in the right place at the right time to design the EV-1 for General Motors. His team had to fight them all the way to keep it from being another mediocre failure. If you do partner with a savant, most of your work will involve running interference to prevent sabotage of progress.



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08 Sep 2020, 6:37 am

maycontainthunder wrote:
Something smells funny here and it isn't this jester. :jester:

I've tried special interest jobs firstly in a cycle shop, horrible. The second was in a model/hobby shop which drove me try and end my life more than once.

Job in my special interest? NO. WAY.


I can understand this.

I did have the problem though that I have some sort of mental wall which somehow stopped me from seeing employment potential outside my special interests, as somehow I have difficulty to learn new tasks that I cant relate to one special interest or the other.
With either of my special interests, I can learn and it stays, but if I try to learn outside of one of my interests, it is tough, as I can learn, then if I go back to it the next day I will have to begin learning from scratch again. It is as if I had never been there learning the first day. It takes me several takes to learn a subject that is outside my special interest "Walls", and then if I should not use the information I have gained, a relatively short time later it goes. Yet with my special interest, even I am astounded that I can remember things. The other day I remembered the date a certain class of railway locomotive was built, and I had it exactly right, and this was information I learned some 30 odd years ago and have never used since, as I used to model in the Great Western Railway and decided to model in British Railways for the next 25 years. (I now model in 7mm narrow gauge in a freelance style which really suits my non conformist character. While I love standardization of parts etc as it really makes life easier, I do not really like to copy the real thing as I much prefer to do my own thing).

It is strange how I can memorize things well within the boundaries of a special interest, but outside my interests and information can be difficult to retain. I do know that I have a VERY visual memory and brain thinking pattern. I think in pictures and like video films if that makes sense? I don't think in words or numbers. I have to translate numbers into domino like visual dots and convert the base of dots I have visualized into base ten to give an answer if that makes sense?


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Robert312
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09 Sep 2020, 7:10 pm

I have a special interest, but they are not the type that pays. I was a photographer. Photojournalism was my calling but I got onto a newspaper where I was treated shabbily and fired. When I was studying journalism I had an idea how to make a photo essay more interesting but the teacher told me, "This is the way it is done." I did a piece for my master's. I was told to make the paragraphs shorter. I made the change then had to leave to go to a convention. To my horror, when I got back I discovered that one of the paragraphs was in the wrong place! Also when I did show it the feedback I got was that I had too many pictures of the same thing. I needed to be able to hone my skills. I should have sought out a better school but I was comfortable where I was. I tried to go into commercial photography but the supply of photographers outstripped the demand, and in the 90s those jobs were already diminishing. I also have a knack for graphic design but that field also has a line going down the street and around the corner and only the aggressive or the social have a chance.


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09 Sep 2020, 7:22 pm

Gosh, I wish I had a special interest I could use in some way to make money, but no one's going to pay me to watch the same movie ten times in a week, and knowing the name, type(s) and evolution requirements (when applicable) of every Pokemon in the games isn't likely to get me anywhere. Those are the kind of interests I typically get.


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09 Sep 2020, 8:34 pm

Joe90 wrote:
Why do you have a yahoo address as your username?

maycontainthunder wrote:
Something smells funny here and it isn't this jester. :jester:


I dug a little deeper. Assel Shardarbekova is a first time poster. She does not have Autism nor Asperger's. According to her profile in LinkedIn, she is a Certified Behavior Technician at H.E.A.L Behavior Consulting in Seattle, Washington. She received a B.S. in Neurobiology from the University of Washington. She was recently accepted into the masters in education program at UW where her focus will be Applied Behavioral Analysis.

She is part of the CANVAS - CAN Virtual Association of Scholars group where she posted the following message a few weeks ago on 16 August.

Quote:
Hello!
My name is Assel Shardarbekova. I'm a student at University of Washington looking to start a platform to help communities with developmental differences and other disabilities. I'm doing this survey to hear people's opinions and look at presented issues from a different perspective. The answers are totally confidential and will only serve the purpose of forming the platform idea. None of these questions are mandatory, so please feel free to leave them blank if you feel uncomfortable.
Thank you in advance and your responses are greatly appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link

Best,
Assel Shardarbekova


The link is to a survey. So it sounds like a research project. I do not detect anything nefarious in this request. But Alex or the MODS might like to be consulted first.


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10 Sep 2020, 3:55 am

jimmy m wrote:
Joe90 wrote:
Why do you have a yahoo address as your username?

maycontainthunder wrote:
Something smells funny here and it isn't this jester. :jester:


I dug a little deeper. Assel Shardarbekova is a first time poster. She does not have Autism nor Asperger's. According to her profile in LinkedIn, she is a Certified Behavior Technician at H.E.A.L Behavior Consulting in Seattle, Washington. She received a B.S. in Neurobiology from the University of Washington. She was recently accepted into the masters in education program at UW where her focus will be Applied Behavioral Analysis.

She is part of the CANVAS - CAN Virtual Association of Scholars group where she posted the following message a few weeks ago on 16 August.

Quote:
Hello!
My name is Assel Shardarbekova. I'm a student at University of Washington looking to start a platform to help communities with developmental differences and other disabilities. I'm doing this survey to hear people's opinions and look at presented issues from a different perspective. The answers are totally confidential and will only serve the purpose of forming the platform idea. None of these questions are mandatory, so please feel free to leave them blank if you feel uncomfortable.
Thank you in advance and your responses are greatly appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link

Best,
Assel Shardarbekova


The link is to a survey. So it sounds like a research project. I do not detect anything nefarious in this request. But Alex or the MODS might like to be consulted first.


Fair enough but the number one thing that sets off the metaphorical spidey senses is some random person posting, apparently without making the effort to talk with the mods first, and wanting us to take a survey. To me this is a huge red flag given that the internet is riddled with people trying to take advantage in some way.

One aspect of the mods task is to keep us all safe and because we have an awful lot of vulnerable people on here and the way this thread was started without prior discussion with the mods could mean that it isn't safe and some of our members could end up with their personal information stolen.

The mods job is often a thankless task but they are meant to be a layer of protection and I feel that this bypassed that layer.



jimmy m
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10 Sep 2020, 8:33 am

maycontainthunder wrote:
One aspect of the mods task is to keep us all safe and because we have an awful lot of vulnerable people on here and the way this thread was started without prior discussion with the mods could mean that it isn't safe and some of our members could end up with their personal information stolen.

The mods job is often a thankless task but they are meant to be a layer of protection and I feel that this bypassed that layer.


I don't disagree.


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10 Sep 2020, 4:08 pm

It seems that the OP has no interest in participating in this thread, only in encouraging people to contact her. People come here sometimes with hidden agendas.

OP, it does seem odd that you were unwilling to disclose your special interest in ABA, and this combined with lack of interest in replies suggests you may have a hidden agenda here stemming from some self interest of your own.

Spam is when someone comes here with an agenda to see their own product or services. It can be covert or overt. Both are against the rules.

It appears that you very recently began to study ABA (according to Google) and there was no evidence that you have any qualifications or expertise in what you say you are offering vis a vis seeking employment.

I will leave the thread for the meantime as members may want to add comments about the idea of newcomers using WP for sometimes unclear and/or dubious reasons.



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10 Sep 2020, 5:48 pm

I'm very interested in loom knitting. I make hats, scarves and toys. I'm also interested in doing felt and pen drawings and painting small wooden objects and rocks as well. I'm planning on selling my finished goods at my local flea market as soon as the pandemic is over.


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