Foundations: Language, Models, and the Engineering Context

Core Concepts

The language has changed — and so has the underlying model

Not long ago, the standard vocabulary for describing neurological variation was built entirely around disorder and deficit. "High-functioning autism." "Asperger's syndrome." "Disorder" as a suffix attached to nearly everything. That language shaped how clinicians, employers, and individuals themselves understood what was happening — and it consistently pointed in one direction: something is wrong with this person, and the goal is to fix or manage it.

That framing has shifted significantly. The DSM-5 (2013) consolidated autism diagnoses. The ICD-11 (effective 2022) moved to different classification schemas. And a growing body of research now favors neurodiversity-affirming approaches — frameworks that treat neurological differences as variations rather than defects. Terms like "Asperger's syndrome" and "high-functioning autism" have been formally discontinued or are increasingly considered problematic. "Neurodivergent" and "neurodivergence" have become preferred terms across research and practice communities.

This is not just semantic tidying. The words in use reflect a theory of the problem. Deficit language asks: what is wrong with this person and how do we remediate it? Neurodiversity-affirming language asks: what does this person need to do their best work, and how does the environment need to change? Those are different questions, and they lead to different interventions.

The social model: the environment is part of the problem

The medical model of disability locates the problem in the individual — the impairment, the deficit, the thing to be treated. The social model of disability makes a different argument: disability is not just a property of a person, it is also a product of the environment that person is trying to navigate.

Applied to neurodivergence, this matters practically. Research consistently shows that communication difficulties in workplaces often arise from person-environment mismatch and organizational design choices, not solely from the characteristics of neurodivergent employees. A workplace that:

• mandates synchronous, verbal-first communication for all decision-making,
• relies on implicit social cues rather than explicit instructions,
• penalizes directness while rewarding vague consensus signaling,
• treats the dominant neurotypical communication style as the unmarked default,

...is a workplace that has designed barriers into its processes. The neurodiversity framework builds on the social model by arguing that these barriers are not inevitable features of work — they are design choices, and they can be designed differently.

The question is not "how does this person adapt to our environment?" but "how does our environment need to change to support how this person works best?"

This shift has real implications for what counts as a solution. Under the medical model, accommodation is about helping the individual cope. Under the social model, accommodation is about fixing the design flaw.

The double empathy problem: communication is a two-way street

A related reframing comes from the double empathy problem — a concept that describes bidirectional communication difficulty between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals.

The traditional framing of autistic or ADHD communication styles treats difficulty as one-directional: the neurodivergent person lacks the social skills to communicate effectively with neurotypical people. The double empathy problem challenges this. It argues that both groups struggle to understand and empathize with each other's communication styles, creating a two-way breakdown. When a neurotypical person interprets directness as rudeness, or reads neurodivergent body language through a neurotypical interpretive lens, they are making misreadings that are just as consequential as any misreading in the other direction.

A 2025 systematic review of 52 papers found that autistic people generally report better communication experiences and quality of life when interacting with other autistic people, compared to autistic-neurotypical interactions. This is not evidence that autistic communication is defective — it is evidence that communication works better when both parties share similar norms and interpretive frameworks.

The practical implication: communication friction in a team is not evidence that one party needs to be fixed. It is often a design problem — a gap in shared norms, documentation, and explicit expectations — that both parties contribute to and both can work on.

Engineering culture: amplifier of both strengths and pressures

Engineering workplaces have some properties that can genuinely work in favor of neurodivergent engineers. Systems thinking, precision, deep focus, and skepticism toward vague reasoning are culturally valued. Many neurodivergent people find that the analytical demands of software engineering align well with the way they naturally process problems.

But engineering culture also carries specific pressures that can make things harder. Research on the tech sector identifies a particular contradiction: engineering workplaces often claim advancement is based purely on technical merit, while simultaneously requiring "culture fit" and participation in informal social rituals — team lunches, off-the-cuff whiteboard sessions, social bonding outside working hours. For neurodivergent engineers, this creates a double burden: maintain technical performance and mask social differences and appear to fit a cultural mold that was never designed around you.

The emphasis on constant learning, rapid adaptation, and high-performance expectations — without acknowledgment of support needs — creates conditions where neurodivergent engineers feel obligated to mask both their differences and any need for accommodation. The result is not a meritocracy. It is a system that filters for the ability to mask.

This cuts both ways. The same cultural intensity that creates pressure can also support neurodivergent engineers when the environment is well-designed: explicit norms, written documentation, deep work time, direct communication standards, and tolerance for unusual working styles are all consistent with engineering culture at its best. Engineering is not inherently hostile — but it requires intentional design to be genuinely inclusive.

The curb-cut effect: designing for neurodivergent engineers benefits everyone

The curb-cut effect is a well-known pattern in accessibility: curb cuts in sidewalks were designed for wheelchair users, but they also benefit people with strollers, luggage, delivery carts, and bicycles. Universal design — "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design" — consistently produces positive externalities that extend far beyond the original population the design was intended to serve.

The same pattern applies in software engineering teams. Accommodations that support neurodivergent engineers — asynchronous communication norms, explicit written documentation, predictable processes, clear expectations — improve overall team communication, reduce context-switching costs, provide clearer onboarding, and support distributed work patterns that benefit everyone.

This matters strategically, not just ethically. When teams frame inclusive process design as "accommodations for a minority," it creates a two-tier system where neurodivergent engineers must disclose and justify their needs to access basic support. Universal support approaches avoid this — they normalize communication practices that serve neurodivergent engineers without requiring disclosure, and in doing so improve the working environment for the entire team.

Analogy Bridge

If you have ever joined a codebase with no documentation, no README, and no onboarding guide, you have experienced what it feels like to work in an environment that assumes everyone already knows everything.

Experienced engineers navigate undocumented codebases by relying on implicit knowledge — where things are, who to ask, what the unwritten conventions are. Newer engineers, engineers joining from different domains, and engineers returning after a break all struggle disproportionately in those environments. The implicit knowledge gap hits them harder.

Now consider: a well-maintained README, a decision log, clear commit message conventions, and documented architecture choices help everyone — but they are disproportionately valuable to people who cannot rely on accumulated implicit knowledge. Neurodivergent engineers are often in exactly this position with respect to workplace social norms: the implicit "how things work here" is harder to read, less reliable, and more costly to get wrong.

Better documentation of social and communication norms — not as a workaround, but as good engineering practice — is the organizational equivalent of a well-maintained README. It reduces friction for people who cannot rely on implicit knowledge. And it makes the system better for everyone who uses it.

Common Misconceptions

"Neurodivergence is a medical diagnosis, so it's a medical problem." Diagnosis is one way neurodivergence gets identified, but diagnosis does not determine how workplaces should respond. The social model of disability draws a distinction between impairment (the neurological variation) and disability (the barriers created by an environment that wasn't designed for that variation). Medical diagnosis describes the former. Workplace design determines how much of the latter a person actually experiences.

"The communication problem is on the neurodivergent person's side." The double empathy problem directly refutes this. Communication breakdown between neurodivergent and neurotypical people is bidirectional. Neurotypical people misread neurodivergent communication just as frequently as the reverse — they are just rarely asked to notice or correct for it.

"If someone is technically excellent, they'll be fine." Technical performance is not sufficient protection in engineering cultures that require culture-fit and informal social participation. The meritocracy framing obscures the degree to which non-technical factors determine career outcomes, belonging, and access to opportunities. Technical excellence without the ability (or willingness) to mask social differences is frequently not enough.

"Accommodations are special treatment." Universal design principles show that the baseline being used as a reference point is not neutral — it was designed for and by a particular group. Accommodations are corrections to a design that excluded some users from the start. And as the curb-cut effect demonstrates, those corrections tend to improve outcomes for everyone, not just the people they were initially designed for.

"Using the right terminology is just political correctness." Terminology tracks the underlying theoretical model. Deficit-language sources operate from a different set of assumptions about what the problem is and who needs to change. Knowing the difference helps you evaluate what you read and what policies you encounter.