Let’s discuss able-ism in our industry.

For me, I mostly experience it whenever marketing has a “genius” idea that everyone should be little mini-marketers on social media. Essentially, they wanted us to make a lot more noise on social media and do cold outreach in our network. I was in no mood to exploit what little friends I have on social media. Not to mention the fact that I’m really no good at this stuff, and it’s likely to backfire.

I put my foot down on that one - called the initiative ableist right in their “party” channel. And stated that if my participation was an issue, then I’d like to request non-participation as a reasonable accomodation for my autism.

Not sure that was good for my career though. Despite getting many DM’s expressing thanks for standing up. I’m pretty sure higher ups will just think I’m “not a team player”.

So did it work? Yes, but also there may be other consequences to my direct nature that I haven’t seen yet.

  • th3raid0r@programming.devOPM
    3·
    4 months ago

    Fair, and I think I’d have gone that direction if it wasn’t a slack channel where everyone was invited to, and then questioned if they decided to leave. It was also a very noisy channel where it was disrupting my work.

    I didn’t just throw this into some channel in which I wasn’t invited or anything. I actually felt like I wasn’t allowed to leave, which is why other NDs privately thanked me afterwards.

    I can ignore the ignorable, but if you’re going to hunt me down if I ignore it (like they were doing), then I needed to speak up in order for it to stop.

    Typically I do just what you’ve described, just kinda ignore it.

    • RonSijm@programming.dev
      2·
      4 months ago

      Fair-ish, but it’s still just a public channel - even if you were invited into it.

      Like you can right click a channel -> “Change Notifications” -> Nothing. Then @Channel or @Here or even @'th3raid0r' just stops working. And then mute the channel. Not more notifications from the channel. So that’s not totally unignorable yet

      You can leave a channel, but yea, that triggers a channel notification saying that you’ve left.

      But yea, I don’t know to which degree they were ‘hunting you down’. At some point it’s seems fine to put your foot down.

      I put my foot down on that one - called the initiative ableist right in their “party” channel. And stated that if my participation was an issue, then I’d like to request non-participation as a reasonable accomodation for my autism.

      I probably would have approached that a bit differently though - on one hand, less hostile, like of name calling them an “ableist” -
      And on the other hand, even less compliant and requesting to not participate. I wouldn’t really phrase it as a request. If you’ve been ignoring them so far, and they DM you, wait half an hour to respond and just somewhat politely decline and say “yea, I’m not gonna do that.” - and then continue to ignore them some more. By requesting it and asking for accommodations you’re already way too far into accepting it as your problem

      As long as it’s becoming loads of work for them to even get close to anything compliant, the more likely they’ll just give up on it