Two people were in a JLG scissor lift removing a panel to get to the motor that controlled one of the flap motors of the KC-10 as the smell of an evaporating rain lingered on the grassy field of the Air Force flightline on a mid-summer’s day in New Jersey.
RUSS
Hey. Get me the multi-meter and let me know what the ohm readings should be.
ME
Here you go. T.O. says that it should be somewhere around, or above 10 MΩ.
RUSS
What’s the wire number?
ME
12-23-660-3
RUSS
Shit… Looks like it’s got a short. Is the circuit breaker tripped?
ME
Yeah, I tagged it too.
RUSS
Okay.
Russ began working the controls to lower us. As we slowly made our way down, I asked him what the issue was and he told me that the part didn’t need to be pulled out and replaced, then went on to explain to me that the most likely problem was somewhere else. If it were, it would take us 30 minutes to fix the plane instead of 16 hours; either way we had to get to the parts shop.
On the way there, I asked how he knew what it was and could not follow his explanation. After we replaced the easier part, powered up the plane and did an operational check, we found that the actuator wasn’t broken. This was where my curiosity started, but it wasn’t until a few days later that I asked Russ to teach me how to troubleshoot, and he instantly replied with “no” and kept working.
Russ never did teach me how to troubleshoot; he taught me how electricity flowed through every component of the aircraft. When I left that base, I asked him why he never taught me to troubleshoot, and he said: “I cannot teach you how to fix problems like I do and I don’t want you to fix them like me. If we all look at things the same way nothing gets fixed. You have to know what normal looks like and how to get back to that, nothing else matters.”
Here’s to the elephant in the room – I see you, others smell you, and others say that they are working together with you, but how many have accepted you?
The elephant in the room when it comes to those with learning deficiencies is effort. It’s hard enough to work and get people who don’t have the special needs to understand an explanation. When it comes to those with neurodiverse minds, the problem is amplified. We may not understand the concept, we may repeat the concept to you in a way that doesn’t align with your thought process, or worse yet, we may ask a question that derails the whole thing.
Where neurotypical minds (to me) seem more willing to accept an outcome without concrete feasibility, I need to know that if I get to an endpoint there is a condition that will be met. Others are okay with the “well, this might work” answer. I am alright with the “well, this is good enough” version, because that says something works. It’s not optimized, but it’s functional. There is a lot of comfort in that because a process was completed. Orderly or not, something moved along in a way that can be reverse engineered.
Engineers and architects “walk” people through complex processes all the time, and we assume the listener sees what we see. When there is an established understanding of capabilities, that assumption is cheap, because everyone in the environment has already been vouched for. So how do you get into that environment? You interview.
An interview is the one place that understanding does not exist. The two people at the table have known each other for minutes. One of them has a series of questions that feel basic. The other is meeting the question and the questioner for the first time.
It’s not uncommon for a question that should have been “What is a data transform?” to arrive as the interview version, “When doing an ELT or ETL pipeline, at what stage does data convert to a structured format usable by the platform?” The second is the first in disguise. One gives the name and asks for the function. The other gives the function and asks for the name. The answer is the same word, and the interviewer already knows it, so the question sounds easy to them. That is fine if the interviewer wants to see what gets set aside along the way.
INTERVIEWER
Picking up from the vector search part and the AI assistant, what’s a transform?
ME
Are you asking about a Transform, or a Transformer?
INTERVIEWER
Is there a difference?
Transform. Transformer. Two letters apart. I could not tell which one he meant, and asking did not settle it. In the heat of an interview there is no time to rule out the wrong reading and no history with the person asking to do it for you. In asking which one he meant, I had already answered a different question: how do you handle one that is vague or built to trap you?
The follow-up was the volley. If I answered yes, there is a difference, I would lose the conversation. If I answered, “Yes, there is a difference, but they are both right depending on what you need. Is there an issue with the data model’s outputs?” I would open the door for him to decide whether the problem was in how the data was converted or in how the model processed it.
While I was an aircraft mechanic, I was penalized if I memorized procedures. We always worked on the planes with large books called “Technical Orders” or T.O.s as we’d call them. My instructor and mentor Russ would constantly tell me “never memorize the T.O.”
An explanation that jumps around is often mistaken for one that lacks succinctness of thought, but succinctness is narrower than that. It’s the gap, or lack of one, between knowing what you want to say next and actually getting it out. Someone can jump around in the order of their explanation and still be succinct within each jump, landing on the right word the first time. Someone else can hold a perfectly logical sequence and still take three tries to say each piece of it, circling a word before it lands. The jumping around, the forward-and-back, that’s a different problem: knowing what to say next. Succinctness is what happens once you already know.
The elephant, it turns out, is also the room itself: the other people in it who lack the patience to be curious. This lack of patient curiosity is what I will frame as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. The gorilla is what wrecks relationships, confidence, and so much more. Once bitten by it, engineers and other semi-introverted people will say all they feel needs to be said at once, so they aren’t asked more condescending questions.
When the questions are pre-emptively avoided through an assumed depth of response, there will inherently be more jumping around, further validating the perception that this person with ADHD, Hyperlexia, the Dys*’s, and other forms of neurodivergence is simply “not smart enough.” Having lived through that is a large part of why I share stories and topics that make me so vulnerable to criticism. It could be said that it’s happened so much I’m a bit calloused to it.
Russ knew how to speak elephant. He understood that troubleshooting and explaining concepts is like telling someone a dream. You remember details as they come up, but most times only after you have already told someone a detail. Dreams, stories, and explaining how to find abnormal all have this in common with one another. They all jump forward and back because that is the nature of that process called trial and error. I have to remind myself that I don’t lack intelligence, and I don’t need to prove myself. When I take that pressure off my shoulders, everything lines up and I have fun walking with people through a problem.
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