Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.

wanna say you are right. maybe the impact is different on neurodivergent, thats hard to have hard data on. HRs job is litterally to use a certain budget to fit all the ppl in, thats why they never give a raise if you dont ask, unless they need to give it to cover other risks (retention).

best lesson for me was an HR manager explaining it to me, after finally after 3 years i asked pretty please to give a lil raise, i was still trainee after all that time.

he smiled and said he thought id never ask. made me senior on the department matching my input. and told me this exact fact. He said, why should i give you a raise if you seem happy where ur at? never complain, never ask, never get.

its harsh but its good to understand certain hashness. Then you can work around it, step over that bridge, and be more active in tracking your input, their expectations, and showing them the mismatch deservant of a raise or promotion.

its often peoples shyness or false expectations that get them in such a situation where they feel very under valued. they are because they under value themselves or dont know how to translate/express their value to another persons perspective. another harsh truth. Especially if you are neurodivergent, the way you see things and another is further apart, so your words need to do more to reconcile that difference to generate mutual understanding.

in an ideal world this would not happen or be needed, ofcourse. but we dont live in an ideal world, and there is no switch to flip to make it an ideal world.

It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.

That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.

I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.

This is an "all lives matter" flavor of comment. Discussing difficulties that autistic folks often have, which are usually exacerbated by autistic traits and struggles but not caused by autism, does not mean nobody else has those troubles.

But it's common and extremely frustrating for anyone neurodivergent to be told "but everyone feels that way" whenever they discuss any of their issues.

The difference, I think, is that non-autistic people aren't as inclined to believe the same lie when it's told over and over for years.

> This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends

But I've repeatedly told over the years by clever libertarian software engineers that I don't need a union because it's better to just go to the boss with your concerns, instead of making things so adversarial.

Blue collar workers have understood this for a long time, and even occasionally took up arms against their employers. It's the white collar folks who are just starting to figure this out.