Well put.

> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture

Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.

Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.

For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).

> But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.

... provided that that gauntlet hasn't stuck a label on you that makes everybody think you're unsuitable for any role, and provided that it's bothered to develop the abilities you do have, and provided that other people aren't being unnecessarily rigid about what roles they'll allow to exist.

Sure, maybe it's stupid to frame it as "THIS counts as being disabled and THAT doesn't"... but we have a world where many systems have decided to do that, and may act slightly less insanely inflexible if they've put you in the "disabled" bucket.

If everybody has some limitations, maybe everybody should get some accommodations. You know, so that they can actually contribute using their strengths. But I'm not holding my breath.

You are actually landed on the difference between “impairment” and “disability”! They’re often used interchangeably (along with “handicapped”), but they have specific meanings.

https://med.emory.edu/departments/pediatrics/divisions/neona...

The original article is more enlightening: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... (Gift link taken from the linked article, not my own)

The stats are thin because not everything from private universities (where the disability numbers are highest) is reported. However they did get this:

> L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator at Ohio State University, told me that 36 percent of the students registered with OSU’s disability office have accommodations for mental-health issues

Note that's only accommodations for mental health issues, so exclusive of the numerous other disability types.

The article is pretty clearly someone trying to drag disability on to the stage of the culture war because it's another group that's easy to other, imo.

This Is detail often left out of this debate . A diagnosis does not imply accommodations.

I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.

lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.

> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge.

Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their career.

A new patient who tries Adderall will feel a sense of euphoria, energy, and motivation that is temporary. This effect does not last. This is why the Reddit ADHD forums are full of people posting "I just took my first dose and I'm so happy I could cry" followed a few weeks later by "Why did my Adderall stop working?". The focus part is still mostly working, but no drug is going to make you feel happy, energized, and euphoric for very long.

> Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".

You're confusing two different things. Registering with the school's disability office is orthogonal to getting a prescription for anything.

If you have ADHD, for neurotypical people it might feel that you are performing better but results will not improve https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/smart-drugs-can-decrease...

They really don't, and if they did then would it be so bad if people who didn't "need" them took them?

Obviously if there's safety issues but for stimulants unsafe doses will 100% always decrease performance, because they'll affect sleep.

Accommodations don't have to be used in all classes. They might need accommodations in an English class and no accommodations in the scientific or math classes. Usually this isn't evaluated per class, it's evaluated per student and then it's up to the student to use or not use the accommodations for the various classes they take.

That people know they do not actually need/qualify for accommodations, but misrepresent themselves in order to get them?

Cheating is the malicious interpretation, same way steroids are considered cheating in other competitions. (college admission is a competition, there are fixed number of seats and you cheating to get a seat hurts someone else.)

Getting a diagnosis to get more time to complete tests. https://accommodations.collegeboard.org/how-accommodations-w...

I don't understand how yous can be ignorant of this. In the USofA you get advertised at continuously by drug companies.

Do you really think they spend that money advertising, and that you can then not buy the products?!?

Sure, you need a corrupt doctor. But the amount of advertising tells you exactly the amount of corrupt doctors that can act as drug dealers for you.

If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.

Not rocket science.

Somehow the whole country has collective blindness to this fact that is scarily obvious to anyone from outside the USofA that drops by.

Drugs adverts for prescription drugs should be illegal: because there is no legal justification for them.

One example of a malicious explanation would be: people are lying about having a disability to get some sort of benefits they don’t need, likely at the expense of someone who does need those benefits.

> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

How do you know this?

Do you have access to their medical records?

Are you in HR and have access to any accomodations they may have filed?

Do they even have accommodations filed at work? Neither I nor many of the people I knew in university who had accommodations needed them in the workplace because the structure of an undergrad course setting is wildly different from that of an actual workplace.

I have told HR at basically every place I've worked that I had filed for accommodations during university and that I generally manage my disability well but that I may need to file for formal accommodations at some point in the future. This isn't something that I've necessarily told people I work with and it's not visible or obvious. Most disabilities aren't.

> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

Were you a solo founder of 5 companies? I literally cannot fathom that you worked at 5 even very modest-sized tech companies and never experienced a colleague with some level of what we’d call neurodivergent.

I can’t validate that the rate is 38%, but I find it hard to believe it’s under 5% and if it’s 5%, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid crossing paths across 5 companies and 15 years.

>I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies

How does one even know this? Do you ask everyone you meet if they are neuro-divergent? That’s awkward as hell.

> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

Hmm, have you looked in the mirror perhaps?

> Also DEI benefits!

Ah, you accidentally showed your hand there. DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes. Whether or not that is appropriate, or if the system was unfair, is arguable; fictitious "benefits" are not.

No one gets a DEI check from the government. But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities, we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.

> Is it much though? 38%?

I'd say 30-40% is definitely in line with what I saw at various FAANG employers. Though it may be that other types of employer optimise less for those attributes.

> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies

Have you considered that you yourself may be neurodivergent?

> And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time

This is it exactly. Programmers believe that we are God's special autists. 'Neurodivergent' is a nonfalsifiable label just like 'queer'

> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

I'm guessing you are blind, yea? Otherwise how could you otherwise justify such a statement?

> > The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual

> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

Just another anecdote, but where I work (tech startup) there are at least 7 other employees (that I know of) and I can identify every single one as autistic. Three are one type, another three are another type, and I think the one other as well as myself are the same type.

Research in the space hasn't advanced enough yet for this to be consensus, but in my opinion this preprint is exactly correct, and is what taught me that there are even subtypes to recognize at all: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...

There are, of course, plenty of non-neurodivergent tech companies. These are typically boring corporate ones, though I think there are some non-flashy ones that are perfectly respectable. I don't think Microsoft would count, though; Asperger's can look a lot like a lack of neurodivergence if you don't pay close enough attention.