Microsoft Wants Autistic Coders. Can It Find Them And Keep Them?

The day before Blake Adickman was scheduled to start interviewing at Microsoft last spring, he called his parents and kept them on the phone as he walked from his hotel to the building where his meetings were set to take place. His parents, back in Boca Raton, Florida, zoomed in on Redmond, Washington, on Google Maps and followed along. When he arrived at the building, he took a photo of its entrance and texted it to them. Then he turned around and retraced his steps to his hotel.

Adickman is autistic. He is 26 years old, with a full beard and a broad-shouldered build, but his affect—chatty, guileless, and eager to please—makes him seem younger than his age. One of the features of his autism is that he gets frazzled by unfamiliar experiences, and the practice walk to Microsoft was meant to try to diminish the newness of his surroundings. This was one of the most important moments of his life, and he didn’t want to mess it up.

In the past, Adickman had never disclosed his autism when he applied for jobs. Once, a manager had berated him for making a list of tasks on his phone instead of in handwriting, and he’d wanted to explain why he preferred typing to writing: a quirk in fine motor skills, associated with autism, that made for messy penmanship. “I have hypermobility,” he’d blurted. “I don’t care what you have,” his manager had replied. He would soon quit.

Adickman and millions of adults with autism often find themselves in a difficult bind. They struggle to get and keep jobs because of the disability, but if they disclose it so they can seek accommodations while applying or working—just as someone in a wheelchair, for instance, might request a ramp—they risk facing discrimination from managers or colleagues who mistakenly believe autism, because it affects the brain, must make them less able workers.

This time, though, was supposed to be different.

Normally, when someone applies for a job at Microsoft and gets through the early stages of consideration—the resume screening, the phone interview, maybe a homework assignment to assess their skills—they’re brought on campus for a day of intense back-to-back interviews with managers, where they’re quizzed about their experience and, if they’re applying for a technical position, asked to work out problems on the fly. But Microsoft had brought Adickman and 16 others to join the third cohort in a year-old program crafted especially for autistic applicants.

The program, which began in May 2015, does away with the typical interview approach, instead inviting candidates to hang out on campus for two weeks and work on projects while being observed and casually meeting managers who might be interested in hiring them. Only at the end of this stage do more formal interviews take place.

The goal is to create a situation that is better suited to autistic people’s styles of communicating and thinking. Microsoft isn’t the first to attempt something like this: The German software firm SAP, among a handful of others, have similar programs—but Microsoft is the highest-profile company to have gone public with its efforts, and autistic adults are hoping it will spark a broader movement.

What’s unorthodox about this, of course, isn’t just its setup. It also represents a novel, and potentially fraught, expansion of the idea of diversity. The impulse to hire more autistic employees is based on the same premise as hiring, say, women and people of color: Doing so not only welcomes in a wider range of creative and analytical talent, but brings more varied perspectives into an organization, and makes for a workforce that better reflects the general population of customers.

And yet, being autistic is considered a brain disorder, and it affects the way people process and communicate information—skills that are at the core of many white-collar professions. Adickman and his cohort were, in a sense, subjects in the third iteration of an ambitious experiment. Could the third-largest corporation in the world make the case that hiring and employing autistic people, with all their social and intellectual quirks, was good, not bad, for business?

“Are You Sure?”

It has been almost two decades since an Australian sociology student, who was on the spectrum herself, coined the term “neurodiversity” to signify that brain variations are normal and should be respected, just like differences in gender and race. People with autism, according to this philosophy, aren’t abnormal. It’s just that they might need some extra support to live in a society built with “neurotypical” people in mind. While that concept has gotten some traction in schools, the corporate world has taken little notice. But that might have to change soon.

Diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder, a catch-all name that includes a range of symptoms from muteness to the milder social awkwardness of Asperger Syndrome, have become much more prevalent over the past couple of decades. One in 68 children were diagnosed with ADS in 2012, up from one in 10,000 in the 1980s. Many researchers believe this is largely because growing awareness of autism has meant more children are being correctly diagnosed.

Soon those children will be old enough to enter the workforce. About half of autistic children have average or above-average intellectual ability, according to the CDC. The unemployment rate among autistic adults, though, is extraordinarily high—up to 80%, by some estimates, according to the advocacy group Autism Speaks, though precise figures are hard to find.

“As a whole, people with autism—even those who are quite bright, and intellectually quite capable—are facing worse job prospects because of their social challenges,” says Dave Kearon, the director of adult services at Autism Speaks. Kearon and other experts believe that companies’ traditional hiring processes are biased against autistic candidates. Someone who looks at his lap instead of at his interviewer, for example, might come across as awkward or even rude. “They can’t get a job that’s commensurate with their abilities,” says Kearon. “You’re really setting them up to fail.”

I first met Adickman during his visit to Microsoft. The company had allowed me an exclusive look inside the autism program and, for three days, I sat in a conference room as Adickman and the 16 other candidates listened to classical music and worked in small groups to build simple devices out of Legos. Two men sat at the front of the room, observing them and taking notes that they’d share with managers. Later, managers themselves would stop by.

When Adickman and I stepped out of the room to talk for a couple of minutes, he stared off to the side instead of at me—a typical trait among autistic people—but this quirk didn’t reflect a general reticence. If anything, Adickman was more talkative and forthcoming than people usually are upon meeting a journalist for the first time. “I’ve been basically jumping from contract job to contract job,” he admitted. “When I got invited out here, I was like, ‘Are you sure?’”

He was maybe the most self-deprecating of the candidates I met, but he was also among the most articulate in describing how autistic people can have significant job strengths, in addition to impairments. “They can have a drive toward something to the point of obsession. You don’t have to tell someone not to go home early. They’ll just stay.”

It became apparent that Adickman was describing one of his own traits. One evening, I met him for dinner, and he told me he’d been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and My Little Pony. He spent most of the two-hour meal deconstructing the programs.

People might think of them as different from each other, he said, the first cynical and the latter idealistic, but they both deal with how confusing human behavior can be: “They’re about conflicts that come with difficulties socializing.” At one point, I tried to steer the conversation toward Microsoft, but Adickman said he couldn’t switch topics right then. Part of his brain had lit up when we’d started talking about his favorite shows, he said, and he wasn’t done.

Adickman sometimes imagined his own interactions as TV plot points, which helped him figure out resolutions, he said. He most related to one character on My Little Pony—a young dragon named Spike who is bullied and misunderstood. “I’m definitely him,” he said. “He’s a guy who wants to help others, and he’s treated like shit, even though he’s really quite competent.”

Finding The Right Match

Now that autism diagnoses are on the rise, the state of the autistic workforce is attracting the attention of people who are in the position to change it: high-level corporate executives who happen to have autistic children and understand that, given the right setting, autistic people can not only thrive but can show off skills and traits that non-autistic people are less likely to have.

Early last year, two such Microsoft employees began laying the groundwork for a new hiring program, inspired by CEO Satya Nadella’s mission to transform the company’s culture to be more open and fast-moving. (Nadella has personal experience with the challenges of disabilities: Two of his children have special needs.)

Mary Ellen Smith, corporate vice president of worldwide operations, and Jenny Lay-Flurrie, now Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer, believed that hiring more autistic employees would be well aligned with Microsoft’s broader goals. They’d also seen firsthand, through their children, that many autistic people are not only perfectly capable of meeting serious intellectual demands—they also can have qualities that are suited for tech jobs, such as being detail-oriented and methodical. Perhaps by adjusting the hiring process, Lay-Flurrie thought, Microsoft could discover great candidates other companies were overlooking.

“The unemployment rate is chronic,” she says, “which is not a reflection of the talent pool, it’s just a reflection of these people not getting through the door.”

In early 2015, Smith and Lay-Flurrie sketched out a small pilot program with the help of Neil Barnett, Microsoft’s director of inclusive hiring and accessibility. The plan was to identify, through an open application process, a small number of candidates who seemed both to have the appropriate skills and, crucially, to be ready and willing to work in a professional setting at Microsoft’s headquarters.

Those candidates would be invited to spend several weeks on campus working on projects and meeting managers who have committed to considering people from the program. The goal: Make as many good matches as possible, though it would be up to managers to decide whether to extend an offer.

Adickman had tried his best, leading up to his visit to Microsoft, to minimize surprises. But on the third day of the program, one of the four members of Adickman’s group, a kid from upstate New York, disappeared. Soon after, one of the men from the front of the room crouched by the table where Adickman’s group had been working on their Lego project. The New Yorker had been unsettled by how different Redmond was from home, the man explained, and had decided to go home. With only three people left in their group, Adickman and his teammates each had to take on more responsibilities. On another occasion, a different group member, a woman with a non-technical background, started crying and ran out of the room. It turned out that, because she didn’t know how to code, she’d felt left out of her teammates’ conversations.

Adickman tried to focus on what he could control. Some evenings, he brought homework assignments back to his hotel room. He’d be exhausted, but he’d make sure to meet all the deadlines. Over the course of the two weeks, the meetings with managers became more formal. Adickman couldn’t help but be forthcoming about his worries. In one conversation with a manager named Jeff Ting, he admitted, “I’m nervous.”

Adickman didn’t know it, but Ting had a son on the autism spectrum. Yes, Adickman was uncommonly honest, and, yes, he made intermittent eye contact, but Ting, knowing that he was autistic, didn’t hold that against him. Adickman rambled a bit in answering one question, but when Ting gave him time, he arrived at a good answer.

“He was a very sharp individual—I mean, he knew his stuff when it came to systems engineering,” Ting recalls. “The thing that he had difficulty with was actually expressing it. I have enough background in autism that I kind of knew that I had to give him a little bit of time and space.”

At the end of the interview, Ting asked Adickman why he’d been anxious. He’d done great.

There’s a stereotype that autistic people don’t care about others. But Adickman told me it wasn’t like that for him. He wanted to be close to people. It was just that he’d never been much good at it. Growing up, his parents and older sisters were warm and talkative, prone to hugging and processing their feelings out loud. But when his mother, Ilene, tried to touch her son, he froze up, almost as if he was repulsed.

Blake was obviously intelligent, though. When he was a toddler, Ilene might be pushing him in the cart at Home Depot, and he’d start reading aloud: “American Standard . . . Kohler . . . ” Around the same time, Blake’s father, Ross, bought him a computer game. Before long, Ross noticed that the Excel program had disappeared from his computer. Blake had deleted it to make room for the computer game to run.

His parents initially rejected an early diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, but by the time he was a teenager, they had come to accept it. Blake could be stiff and had a hard time maintaining eye contact. When someone got him on a topic he loved—gaming, Japanese animation, computers—he wouldn’t stop talking; when he was bored, he could hardly get through a conversation. His parents weren’t the only ones who noticed his quirks; in middle school, he’d been bullied constantly.

A lot of the time, Blake felt like he wasn’t good at much of anything. But every once in awhile, he’d get this feeling—one that, like all feelings, was hard for him to explain—that he was really intelligent but that his autism kept others from realizing it. He tried his own workarounds. He knew he needed to take a lot of breaks from homework, or else he’d burn out, but he also found it impossible to keep track of time. So he set the microwave timer to go off every 15 minutes. His parents and sisters also tried to help: When he returned from school frustrated that he couldn’t understand the emotional nuances of the novels he was supposed to be reading, Ilene would read the same book and help Blake deconstruct the characters’ feelings. This is what love looks like. This is grief.

Blake still didn’t like to be touched. But he was Ilene’s son, and sometimes she wanted to be close to him. Beyond that, she thought hugging was a skill he should have. So Blake would stand there in front of her, his shoulders up, his arms pressed to his sides, his eyes fastened to the floor. And she’d look at him and say, “Sucks to be you. I’m coming in for a hug. Incoming!”

When it came time to go to college, Adickman and his parents chose the Rochester Institute of Technology. It had an excellent program in information technology—a good fit for someone passionate about computers. Though the Adickmans had made a calculation not to disclose Blake’s autism in his college application, worried that it would hurt his chances of acceptance, Ilene had looked into the university’s resources for students like Blake and had been impressed by a special spectrum-support program for autistic people; once Blake arrived, he joined that program. He did poorly in the classes he found boring, but when he graduated in 2012, Amazon was impressed enough to fly him out to Seattle to interview for a position.

It was not his finest moment. Though Adickman was interviewing for a job in IT—a position that usually involves managing a company’s back-end technology, rather than writing code for Web sites or apps—his interviewers, as he recalls, badgered him about his programming skills. “They kept me in a room and had all these different people ask me coding questions,” he remembered later.

Adickman’s habit of being honest and self-effacing, both common autistic traits, made for a lethal combination.

“I think my honesty gets the better of me sometimes,” he later told me. Where another candidate, faced with Amazon’s questioning, might fudge his answers and exaggerate his abilities, Adickman just kept answering, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He didn’t get the offer. He returned to Boca Raton to live with his parents and spent the next several years taking low-level I.T. jobs at small, no-name companies. Invariably, within a couple of months, he’d get laid off with little or no explanation. By February of this year, he was unemployed again. What have I done in life, he sometimes thought, to not be able to get a job in my own field?

One day, his mother came to him. A woman from the R.I.T. spectrum support program had called her. Microsoft had started a program to hire autistic people with technical skills, the woman had told her, but it wasn’t getting enough great applications. What was Blake up to?

Will It Scale?

Lay-Flurrie and Barnett are now trying to scale the program, holding it four times a year. “It’s great that we’re hiring five or 10 or 15 people, but to really drive that inclusive culture, we’ve got to figure out how to get a lot of these things into the mainstream,” Barnett says. To facilitate this, they’ve shortened the program, which used to last four weeks, to two weeks, and expanded the applicant pool, which was initially restricted to locals, to candidates from all over the country.

(As for costs, Microsoft does not “share actual dollars when it comes to hiring talent,” Barnett said. The costs—”far less than we thought”—include spending associated with “ensuring a great cohort/hiring experience,” he said, “but most of our investment is actually in the people” who work on the program.)

Barnet and his colleagues face some persistent difficulties. One serious challenge is that there’s no well-established pipeline of autistic candidates for technical positions—the issue that the R.I.T. adviser had been trying to help address when she’d first called Adickman’s mother. To hire engineers who are women or people of color, you can go to conferences or organizations for professionals from those backgrounds, but there’s no analog among autistic programmers; what’s more, some autistic people hesitate to advertise their condition to potential employers, as Adickman had done.

Microsoft is trying to address the pipeline problem by contacting more universities’ disability offices, which are often aware of the autistic students on their campuses, and by getting the word out through autism organizations. Still, Barnett and his colleagues wonder if they’re reaching even a fraction of the qualified candidates. Without a strong pipeline, Barnett can’t present hiring managers with the most competitive candidates for their positions. At the April hiring session, although 13 were open, only five candidates met their high bar for employment.

Adickman was back home in Boca Raton by then. Microsoft had promised him and the other candidates that they’d hear an answer within two weeks. Adickman stopped searching for other jobs and just waited.

“It was,” he said, “a very, very long two weeks.” He had felt an unusual sense of ease when he’d visited Microsoft. He’d noted that because so many people smiled at him on campus, they must be happy with their jobs.

Then he got a call from a recruiter: He’d made it. Microsoft, impressed not only with his skills but with the way he’d navigated his group’s social dynamics, was offering him a position as an engineer, working for Jeff Ting, at a salary so much higher than what he’d previously made that it seemed extraordinary to him.

In June, Adickman moved to Redmond, with his parents’ help. When I emailed him to ask if we could talk again, he replied with three words: “Talk about what?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to be more specific, but Adickman, like many autistic people, is literal-minded and wanted a clearer request. I explained that I hoped to learn how he was preparing for the new job. A couple of days later, I met Adickman and his parents for lunch at a Thai restaurant. Adickman’s mother had stocked his place with the things he needed, like toilet paper, and was planning to send her son on a scavenger hunt to make sure he knew where to find everything.

Over pineapple fried rice, Adickman told me he was thrilled. But weighing on him was the concern that he wouldn’t do enough to prove himself at work and would lose his job again. “I need to push myself,” he said, almost as if to himself.

As part of the program’s design, Adickman had been encouraged to seek any accommodations he needed and had been assigned mentors to help with issues as mundane as dealing with the movers and as complicated as having difficult conversations with a boss. His manager and colleagues had also gone through a special training session about autism. From the start, the organizers felt that it wasn’t enough just to hire autistic employees. In order for those people to stay and thrive, they had to be supported.

So far, it appears to be working. Autistic employees told me they feel better at Microsoft than at past jobs, because they know they’ll be assisted in asking for accommodations, they have people who can help them navigate social situations, and they don’t have to hide their quirks. So far, all of those hired through the new program have performed at or above expectations. None have left Microsoft.

Still, this aspect of the program highlights just how different it is from other diversity initiatives. In theory, supporting autistic employees is no different from making sure employees in wheelchairs have access to a ramp. But in practice, it brings distinct challenges, because it involves interpersonal dynamics—what some people believe to be at the center of how colleagues interact with one another, and, in turn, crucial to a company’s success.

Lay-Flurrie observes that autistic people’s abilities and disabilities occupy a wide range. Some are intellectually disabled, a factor that “is going to impact the skills and the talents and what somebody is able to bring to the table.” Those people, she said, might be better suited for a separate Microsoft program that brings on disabled people to provide services like serving meals. All of the promising applicants to the autism hiring program go through a phone screening, early on, which helps the company get a sense of their professional readiness. Still, there’s no clear line that demarcates applicants who are appropriate for the program from those who aren’t. And even among those who are highly intelligent and talented, a person’s individual quirks might make him a great fit for one team but a poor match for another.

Even Ting couldn’t help but wonder how Adickman’s autism might manifest at the office. When he was deciding whether to make an offer, he told me, he asked the program’s organizers explicit questions to gauge how Adickman would fit in with his team. Some people with autism are unsettled by sudden, loud noises and are themselves reserved. “My group’s kind of loud and boisterous, so I was kind of like, ‘Will Blake fit into that environment, or does he have noise sensitivity issues?’ And they were like, ‘No, he’s one of the loud, outspoken ones,’” he recalls.

“But I had to ask, because the last thing we want to do is have someone who’s not a good fit and they become uncomfortable. We’d have to think about what kind of accommodations we’d have to make, and then would it have an impact on the team’s current culture and chemistry?” If Adickman had been sensitive to noise, Ting said, “It would have made the decision harder.”

Starting his new job, Adickman felt gratified. An engineer at Microsoft—what would his old bullies think of that? He had his own office, where he set up a photo collage of his family and a lamp from Ikea. Ting was giving him plenty of time to learn at his own pace. And yet, he had a nagging sense that he didn’t belong. He told his mentor from his team, Dana Brash, that he didn’t feel qualified. “I feel like I cheated to get here,” he admitted. “No,” Brash said. “Microsoft doesn’t hire people as charity cases. You belong here.”

Brash and Ting both told me that Adickman had proven himself early on. One Friday, Brash had been out of the office, and Adickman had taken it upon himself to work on a project involving setting up a virtual machine. By Monday morning, he’d made significant progress. “That kind of turnaround is really impressive,” Brash said. “I tell people, and they’re like ‘Wow.’”

Brash had noticed some of the features of Adickman’s autism—the intermittent eye contact, the rapid speech, the conversational tangents—but instead of encouraging his colleague to behave more like neurotypical people, Brash encouraged Adickman to be himself. He wanted his new colleague to focus on the tasks at hand instead of on the appropriateness of his behavior. Beyond that, he felt that what made Adickman different from others was one of his assets. “If we want to talk about neurodiversity, why would I want to fit him into my box?” Brash said.

It was hard for Adickman to internalize that message. He badgered Brash with questions about what not to do. He worried, for example, about keeping Microsoft’s secrets. He’d signed a form saying he wouldn’t disclose anything confidential, but, being literal-minded, he wished for clearer instructions about what was secret and what wasn’t. “My biggest nightmare is that I share something that I think is cool with one of my online buddies, and I get fired for it,” he told me. If he told friends what he did for a living, for instance, would he be violating the rules?

“This is how my mind works,” he said. “I don’t mind following rules, but if the rules do not make enough sense, it’s hard for me to follow them.”

Adickman also felt lonelier than he’d expected. “I’m not used to spending this much time alone,” he told me. He’d thought Microsoft would be sort of like college, where he used to wander around and find things to do, even on evenings and weekends. But, here, everyone seemed to be older than him, with spouses and children. On weekends, campus was abandoned. It didn’t help matters that he’d dinged his Ford Focus on a post next to his parking spot in his apartment complex, and now he was terrified to drive anywhere.

He came up with what he thought was a good solution to his solitude: He referred some of his autistic friends to Microsoft. He wanted to share his good fortune, and if a friend was accepted, he’d have someone to hang out with. But when he told his mother what he’d done, she got nervous. Referring a friend for a job, she said, was sort of like setting someone up on a blind date. “When you fix someone up on a date, you’re sort of vouching for them,” she told him. If one of his friends got hired and didn’t do well, it might reflect poorly on him. Oh, no, Adickman thought—had he made another faux pas?

Soon afterward, his mother returned home to Florida. It worried Adickman to be left alone, but he was also eager to challenge himself.

“I don’t want her to think that I hate her, but it’s good that I’m getting away,” he confided. “I think I need to fail on my own, and she doesn’t let me do that very often.” Besides, he also had other mentors here. Brash reassured him that Microsoft wouldn’t blame him if his referrals didn’t work out.

A Stepstool To Stand On

One morning, Blake Konrady, another mentor, visited Adickman at his apartment. Konrady was an employment specialist at Provail, a local organization that matches disabled people with work opportunities. He stood in Adickman’s kitchen, filling out his voter registration form for him: “I know you don’t like your handwriting,” he said.

Adickman admitted there was a lot that had confused him about registering to vote. For example—where could he buy a stamp to mail the form? Konrady suggested a Walgreen’s down the street. Adickman called his mom to confirm: “This might sound embarrassing, Mom, but I don’t send mail very often. Just to be sure, can you verify this? I can get postage stamps at Walgreen’s, right?”

In his apartment, her influence was apparent. She had decorated the place with a potted plant and some framed photos. On the fridge was a schedule she’d written up: Monday—use Swiffer. Wednesday—shave, if needed. Friday—check plant.

Adickman also wanted Konrady’s help figuring out how to park his car without crashing into that post again, so they went down into the garage and got into the Ford Focus. Adickman practiced easing into the spot with his mentor’s guidance. “I need to try this two more times,” Adickman said. “That’s okay, we can do that,” Konrady reassured him. After several more rounds of practice, Konrady said goodbye, and Adickman walked to campus by himself. The point, Adickman knew, was for Konrady to help him live on his own, not to do things for him. That morning, he felt better about the parking situation. But by that evening, he was afraid again.

The thing about his autism was the thing about anyone’s autism. Even under the best circumstances, it doesn’t go away: you just learn to live with it. Adickman’s mom often pointed out that one of his sisters, who is five feet tall, would never be able to reach the high kitchen cabinets. She’d just have to use a stepstool. For Adickman, the challenging part, now that he was living alone and wouldn’t have outside support forever, was to find his version of that stepstool.

That was Microsoft’s long-term challenge with its program, too. The more autistic people you hire, the more stepstools you have to find. And though the first year of the program has gone well, employees’ needs may evolve over time: If a successful autistic candidate is promoted into a management job, he’ll likely need different kinds of support. Microsoft’s bet is that dealing with all of this complexity is well worth the trouble, because of the benefits neurodiversity brings. People involved with the program also say that, for the most part, once autistic employees have settled in, their needs haven’t been much different from that of their colleagues.

So maybe it would be a while before Adickman would get in the car again. And maybe it’d take some time to make friends. But work was going as well as could be expected. Ting had told him he was doing just fine. “In your first couple of weeks, all I expect is that you show up and learn,” he’d said. And Adickman was showing up and he was learning.

In one recent episode of My Little Pony, Adickman’s favorite character, Spike the Dragon, had, out of the blue, survived a bunch of death traps and saved someone’s life. People were finally giving him some credit. Adickman didn’t want to get his hopes up, but he suspected Spike’s plotline was starting to get better.

A version of this article appeared in the September issue of Fast Company magazine.