What is your career?

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I'm a Database and Systems administrator for an engineering firm.
Which means I sit in front of a computer with headphones on most days

I've worked with some priests before (set up some networking in their church), it seems to be a rewarding career/life style.

Electrical engineer working in renewable energy as a consultant.

Which basically just means I always have multiple deadlines to meet, all of which are ASAP, and each of which is more urgent than the others.

Awesome! I'm a newbie when it comes to gastropods, but I absolutely fell in love with Stenotrema barbigerum when I found it on our land this past summer! It is a globally vulnerable species!

That sounds really stressful but interesting!

aside from sheer brute force IQ, I wonder what separates the high-paid professionally successful aspies here from the rest?

I’m a furniture and flooring sales consultant. It’s pretty easy really and pays the bills!

If you’d like to know carpet pile density per sq mm or fibre weight per sq mm on my carpets I can tell ya. Nobody actually cares tbh lol.

^^^god bless you Mr. V. and welcome to WP

This ^^^ is what I tried to be and could not get work or the right opportunities. Grew up in a time when women "in the field" were rare and those who got jobs rarer still. My degrees are in botany and mycology. I still flip over logs

Carolina Jessamine, right? That's what made me notice your post. Feel free to PM me anytime you want to talk plants or fungi.

Back to the main thread. I have ended up the past 20 years working as an advocate for services for people with developmental disabilities and it is my own business - social work was privatized in my state - so I can work from "home" and set my own hours, which has made this possible. I now have five people who work with me. In the past I have taught college and also have been a hospice nurse.

I think it has a lot to do with luck. Malcolm Gladwell's book on outliers explains the phenomenon better than I can. Right place, right time - things we have no control over have more to do with "success" as defined by career and pay levels than anything we have control over.

seems 90% of success in life in general, is due to luck. there is an old saying about how it is not enough to have the luck of talent, one must also have a talent for luck.

Last year database administrator & now a software test engineer in some startups.

I would agree with this.
I "fell" into my line of work by being in the right place at the right time. Working in a call center of all places. I was way out of the norm of people working there, and had a great manager that took a chance on me.

it seems only the highest-functioning in our community can say that they "made their luck" and ordered their environment to fit themselves, that they always had a plan and perfectly executed it, no "falling into good fortune" for them. but it has been my experience that those sorts of people also tend to be somewhat self-righteous ("I got mine, so screw you!") and unwilling to consider their aspie brothers who struggle - I call this "the clarence thomas syndrome."

That's just childishness based on a previous sense of inferiority complex, which their small-to-medium success has ostensibly come to negate. Don't mind people like that.

"Luck" is an important factor, if we think of it as a fortunate environment of chain of events out of one's control, but to benefit from luck you have to have a knack for putting yourself in such environments, and responding to such events.

the talent for luck outranks the luck of talent every time, just look at who is POTUS now for proof of that.

Trump is an opportunist par excellence. He will twist and turn everything, manipulate and distort people and facts to no end to get his way through. That's a kind of talent he has, if one is to play devil's advocate. Such talent makes him seem "lucky". On the other hand, he was also born rich. That's a kind of luck nobody can argue against.

In any case, as for successful people with ASD, my two cents is that it comes down to a certain "will to cope socially" as much as brute IQ. I'm not successful by any means but I hold a job and I'm married. I don't think my job is technically difficult (it's mostly boring), but socially, it takes a great toll on me to work in a team all day. When the day is over, I have to go home and chat and pay attention to my significant other. I've been tired for more than a decade now, but it's not a tiredness that can be treated (like for social anxiety disorder) so I'm left to simply live with it and enjoy a certain pride in being an integral part of a wider social circle, even if that pride is mostly intellectual.