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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not officially diagnosed with ADD (on a waitlist though) but autistic, and I second that. I constantly feel like I’m too lazy and yet I got my current job through an internship. It was supposed to last three months and I got an of#er three weeks in, because they were so impressed with my willingness to perform.

    I was very bewildered. I still have to remind myself of that when I feel like I’m not getting shit done because my mind refuses to cooperate. What I can convince myself of by now is that those moments are the productivity normal for most people and that even when I’m like that my productivity is high enough - especially because that is usually the moment when I look into things that are not the absolute core of my job.

    I’m a test automation engineer, but people explicitly want me to not just automate, but also care for quality topics as a whole, so reading relevant blogs and security news and feeding that back into the team is part of my job.

    Still often feel guilty about that, but my boss repeatedly told me I’m absolutely overachieving and fulfilling the job more than he hoped for.

    For me, there’s two takeaways:

    1. you probably have higher standards for yourself that most people, and the moments where your brain cooperates you’re like a racecar compared to a truck, and
    2. find a niche that interests you is of utmost importance. I was once at an info event for SAP and they said that autistic people are intrinsically motivated and it’s almost impossible to get us motivated with things like more money. It’s definitely true for me, and for my few ADHD friends, though I’m not sure if that is in general true. Accepting this has allowed me to make peace with myself and to take a much healthier approach to jobs than before - “I can work any job, I don’t need my dream job” when I was desperate for a job was the most toxic thing I could do to myself.


  • I’m insulted how little effort the author put into supporting his thesis.

    “Streber” in German is a common insult if you’re good in school, and it often meant social death in class. Sure, geek and nerd have become commonplace and are used as German words now, but that’s also because if you are one your English is good enough and it’s just easier to use the short word from another language that pretty much all geeks and nerds use than to use the German one.

    It has actually not really the negative connotation that the English word has, it feels more like a name for a subculture, like goth.


  • That’s the official version, but at least when I talk about some average dude it’s way too long and artificial, I don’t think the name Mustermann actually exists.

    When I think of the most common name to use in casual conversation, I’d probably go for Müller (maybe Peter? Though the first name is probably heavily generation-dependent).

    In older publication you may alse find references to “der deutsche Michel” (the german Michel, short for Michael) as a somewhat condescending reference to the average citizen who is very hesitant to adopt new concepts and tech and not always able or willing to understand complex concepts. Often used to remark that a product/idea will not have a chance on the market because “der deutsche Michel” doesn’t see the pointor would never pick it up.

    Haven’t seen that in a while though, I guess Germans have become more open to new stuff :)