Free Neurodivergent Brains Build Better Systems (2025) 2026

A former manager once described me as a “purist”. It wasn’t the first time a colleague alluded to my obsessive way of thinking but it was the first time someone used it as a compliment. It got me thinking, what if neurodivergent “defects” are the exact architecture the world’s systems need?

Neurodivergence is often pathologized. You may have heard that you’re too rigid, too blunt, too obsessive. These traits may irk humans. I know my friends and family have the patience of a saint for putting up with my idiosyncrasies. Systems are different. I have built and worked on some of the strangest, most exquisite, and highly scalable systems in software. Those systems were masterful because they were built by rigid, obsessive, and blunt people. Those traits build stable infrastructure, write clean code, and destroy inefficiencies in systems.

Neurotypical people are top-down thinkers. They have a hypothesis first then obtain data to support or disprove the hypothesis.

Neurodivergent people are bottom-up thinkers. They begin collecting relevant data first then form their hypothesis or “big picture” later.

Business-facing roles present a strong case for neurotypical people but, as always, creative fields, including software engineering, flip the script. I once managed a team shipping some production code to a customer on a horrendous deadline. It was the final day and we were wrapping up our systems integration tests. A bit after 6PM with the midnight deadline looming and my finger hovering over the deploy button, one of the quietest, shyest engineers I’ve ever managed interrupted me mid-speech and said “Wait, we can’t deploy this yet.” He noticed something that his peers had missed and it saved us from destroying our reputation with the customer.

There was a particular button on the user interface that bugged him. It bugged him because it was a slightly different shade of green in the screenshots than it was in the staging environment. The team looked into it, and sure enough, we had tested a slightly older version of the software, not the exact version we nearly shipped to the customer. He saw and noticed the button but what would have been deployed would have had multiple bugs in the code that weren’t visible and passing because the tests were on the old version too. That’s bottom-up thinking.

We live in a distraction economy. Nearly everything in the modern world seeks to rob our focus and divide it among a million shallow things.

Neurodivergent people don

Source: HackerNews