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Comment by bobsmooth

8 hours ago

That's only because autism is common amongst those groups and you can't build anything worthwhile these days without a lot of autism.

I don't believe that for a second. More likely, infosec tends to attract more results-oriented personalities. To generalize, "who cares what you look like as long as you're good?" As a consequence of that, infosec tends to be a lot more welcoming than other groups I've been around. As long as you act nicely, people generally don't care if you're man, women, both, neither, or a gay horse. And it seems like there's been a feedback loop over many years: that acceptance drew more out-of-the-norm folks, which made it more accepting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But in any case, I thoroughly believe the "joke": turn people away because they don't look / act / think like most others, and soon the very best infosec talent will want nothing to do with you. And based on this article, I'm guessing that's true for other extremely technical fields, too.

  • This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.” [1] Not saying they necessarily are not, but it’s finding correlation where there absolutely isn’t one just to disagree with actual evidence.

    Yeah, I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one.

    1: where is the trans furries representation in senior management and other “results-oriented” fields?

    • > This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.”

      Technically, it's the zeroth time because I never even implied that. I said that the field itself is results-oriented. You usually can't get very far in the career without demonstrating competency at it. Where plenty of other fields had strong unspoken rules of "...as long as you fit in", this one's traditionally been comparatively open to talented people even when they don't look and act like everyone else.