Kam.

I currently build the systems that decide who gets through the door and who gets told, very politely and entirely in protocol, to fuck off. Identity and access management. Almost six years of it. The first half of my career I spent pretending to be a person—not a good person, a normal one, which is harder—because being visibly neurodivergent in corporate America circa 2012 was an efficient way to get "let go as part of a strategic realignment" with a severance package that read like a ransom note somebody forgot to finish.

I have ASD-1 (formerly Asperger's). What they used to call "the quiet kid who memorized the bus timetable for fun." I masked it for the first ten years of my career because being visibly neurodivergent in corporate America in the 2010s was a great way to get “laid off for strategic realignment” or fired for cultural "being a cultural misfit" with no warning and a severance package that looked like an insult printed on letterhead. I learned to perform full time on top of my full time job. I practiced eye contact—not too much, not too little, the Goldilocks duration of a non-threatening male colleague who is definitely listening to your story about your kid’s soccer tournament and not mapping the field positions of the kids in order to optimize the on-field strategy. I learned to laugh at things that weren’t funny. I learned to say “great question” when what I meant was “that question betrays a misunderstanding so fundamental I’d need three weeks and a whiteboard the size of a billboard to correct it.” Neurodivergence looks like this on most days. Getting really worked up with someone's foundational misunderstanding about something and trying to trace back at a system's level where to even begin to educate a mind that veered so far off the tracks that you freeze. Meanwhile, that same person is grinning back at you and you have to decide if you want to be screamed at for correcting the error or yelled at later for ignoring it. The mask worked, though—mostly. It also cost me something every single day—a small soul-toll, exact change, no refunds.

Then around 2019 neurodiversity got fashionable. Big tech realized that people with my wiring could spot patterns in code, process, etc that neurotypicals couldn’t, and for about fifteen minutes they pretended to want us. Posters of smiling autistic people, always smiling, always looking like they'd just won a gift card. They created “neurodiversity hiring initiatives” akin to DE&I and that would later be absorbed by the umbrella we tossed in the rainstorm which were really just ways to pay less to skilled people while patting themselves on the back for their inclusivity all the while fragile people decried this as the ultimate act of corporate betrayal. So a lot of us came out of hiding and let the flat affect hang loose, and it turns out that when you stop burning sixty percent of your processing power performing "normal", you get that sixty percent back. My brain got sharper out of relief.

I started really speaking my thoughts and using the things I had read, even if I knew I was the only person who had done the required reading and said things like “this project plan assumes that the identity graph is a tree, but it’s actually a cyclic directed graph with numerous edge cases that will each individually wreck our quarter if we don’t account for them.” This would have previously been insubordination, but now it was (in-words) tolerated—not supported, mind you. The room would still go quiet and someone from Product would say something like “can we take that offline?” to which I’d say “sure, but the edge cases don’t go offline just because you’re uncomfortable.” This is the pristine clarity of ASD1. It's not looking for a fight, but it's also not at all concerned with your comfort. There's a problem that needs to be solved, and my brain is only interested in the solution. It is fanatically, obsessively fixated on the solution.

For a few brief moments it almost felt like comfort, ego, and nepotism was less important than solving complex problems. Then 2024 happened, cruelty came back into season, and a lot of people—the neurodivergent, the queer, the brown, the ones who were never invited so much as tolerated—quietly went back into hiding. I didn't. I can't anymore. I'm fresh out of mask. I'm not saying this as some macho tough guy. Please don't misunderstand. I'm saying this as a person who's severely and desperately tired of full-time theater and full-time work, and I know I'm not alone.

I studied Maths and Philosophy in an Oxford tutorial system, with minors in History and Biblical Studies, on the theory that university education isn't trade school, so study something profoundly difficult and life-changing. For the uninitiated, a tutorial system is a program run by people who looked like gargoyles handing out a reading list and vivisected my arguments on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for three hours with a group of twelve others. Given my ASD-1, you can probably intuit that I've never really loved class; however, I've always loved education with a visceral passion. Education is something that can never be taken away, that gives shape to everything around you. This program helped set in motion the kind of skills I'd need to learn to learn. Ever since, I've never lost the momentum or passion. Hundreds of hours of game theory, macro-econ, machine learning, the economics of uncertainty, and early American history, and dozens of other myriad topics of interest piped into my skull at highway speed, because the alternative was a podcast where two men explain confidence to each other. I do listen to podcasts. Just not that sort.

I read non-fiction the way starving men eat: desperately, with no table manners, and with a faint sense that this meal might be my last. I fell in love with Shakespeare by random chance—the tragedies, the histories, the ones where everyone dies screaming and the political order collapses because some king couldn’t tell flattery from loyalty (ask me how King Lear changed my life and I'll bore you for hours). The comedies can fuck off; nobody ever learned a damn thing from a play that ends in a wedding. I fell in love with Hobbes, who thought life was nasty, brutish, and short and then built a philosophy around the idea that we need a Leviathan to keep us from eating each other, which is basically the corporate org chart with better prose. Hume, who gently destroyed the idea of causation and then went back to playing backgammon. Heidegger—a Nazi piece of shit, I’ll say it every time, but also the only philosopher who correctly diagnosed that modern technology turns everything, including human beings, into “standing-reserve,” resources to be ordered and optimized and discarded. He'd have adored our headcount-planning meetings. Arendt, who watched Eichmann’s trial and realized that evil isn’t a cackling villain but a guy in a cubicle who "just wants his paperwork to be in order". Durkheim, who wrote about anomie: the disorientation that happens when the norms that hold a society together dissolve, which is exactly what it feels like when your company announces a RIF the same week it spends $40 billion on a stock buyback. Thank Reagan and Welch for that clusterfuck. Maritain, the Catholic personalist who said that a person is a whole, not an individual, not a cog, and that any system that treats people as instruments is structurally evil, which would be really inconvenient for capitalism if anyone still read him.

I'm a nihilist. Let me be precise about that, because people use the word like it means “goth teenager who writes bad poetry.” Nihilism does not mean I think nothing matters. It means I don't think anything matters on its own—no cosmic scorecard, no divine plan that makes your suffering virtuous or your boss's bonus a crime against heaven. The universe is indifferent. Which leaves exactly one source of meaning in the building: you, deciding, and then being on the hook for it. And that means, and this is the part that makes people uncomfortable, that every ounce of meaning in your life is something you have to create yourself. There is no fallback. There is no “everything happens for a reason.” There’s just you, making choices, and the choices you make define whether you’re a person or a piece of standing-reserve. It's not an evangelical position. I respect religious convictions as sincerely as they are held—use religion as a weapon for laundering bullshit and I'll respect your religion as much as you clearly do.

I made some bad choices. I used to be a genuine asshole. Ambitious, credit-grabbing, quiet when I should've spoken—this is often overlooked. In my defense, I'll add I was terrified, and terrified people do terrible things. I had to do my adult life on my own. I grew up without money, and was hurled into an unstable economy with a fucked job market carrying more student debt than the median house cost at the time. Then one morning, after years of struggle and living in the shadow of my own fear, I woke up in a house I owned, no debt, no dependents, a title that would let me walk into virtually any company in the country and write my ticket, and I felt absolutely nothing. The turning point wasn’t dramatic—I didn’t see a ghost or get visited by three spirits. The freedom felt like a room with no furniture, an achievement with no meaning, a zero-sum victory that had cost me the part of myself that remembered why I’d started fighting in the first place. So I changed.

No debt, no dependents—the one credential HR can't revoke. I can afford to mean it when I say no. So I say no. I fight for people. I hire people of all backgrounds at all levels and make it pellucidly clear that everyone's voice is equal when we see that we're heading in the wrong direction, when we have an idea to improve the team, when we need support from the team, and make equally clear that as a leader I'm accountable when we make decisions that don't pan out how we thought they would. I tell the junior devs the truth: that they are not their jobs, that the company will post the role before the obituary runs—ask me about the colleagues and dear friends I've buried—that HR is a risk-management function and not a help desk and will be lovely to you right up until it is legally convenient not to be. The same People Teams that put black squares on Instagram in 2020 are quietly defunding their DEI programs. Document everything. Go to the recital. Add "Open to opportunities" the morning your raise comes in under inflation, because unfortunately the only performance review I've seen the C-suite actually read is an attrition dashboard. Glint surveys are a waste of everyone's time.

While not having a family of my own in the traditional sense, I'm typically the most pro-family and pro-human person in the building. I cover for the new mom so she can pump in peace. I tell the dad with the sick kid to log off and quit apologizing. I fight, in calibration, for the person who took parental leave and got dinged on "impact" for the crime of being a human being for three months. I don't do this because I'm nice. Nice is what you call a man you don't respect enough to fear. I do it because if the cosmos won't hand me a meaning I'll fabricate one, and the one I picked is this: the people the machine is trying to grind down are usually the most worthy and they deserve a break, and I happen to be standing close enough to throw a wrench. Partly it's shame. Mostly it's that it's the right thing to do for someone at my level, and I've run out of reasons not to.