“I am a surgeon!” --- well, I was a Systems Engineer and Software Developer.

A controvercial episode of "The Good Doctor", memes, and the emotional connection I have to it.

Last week I finished the second season of “The Good Doctor”, which I am watching with my wife. I’m #ActuallyAutistic, and she is of unknown neurotype - potentially neither Autistic nor “neurotypical”.

We got to the “I am a surgeon!” episode (actual title is "Breakdown").

(This post will contain “spoilers” for episodes of a season that first aired in 2018-2019, and has been discussed online at length).

It is a controversial series in the #ActuallyAutistic community. Some feel the ccharacter is a mixture of all the things that are observed by outsiders, without much exploration of what is happening inside his head (other than the graphics used during a savant search event). These Savant syndrome graphics reinforce the idea that an autistic person's value is tied strictly to their "output" or "utility" to others.

I agree that no single person is likely to exibit all the traits of the character, but that doesn’t in my mind make the traits used invalid.

Some Autistic people are quite upset at that specific moment and how it might hurt the reputation of Autistic people as a whole, or how there aren’t Autistic actors in early seasons, or autistic writers, or....

But that moment brought me back to the events that led to my retirement. In my case I was hired by one organization back in 2010 that was then “merged” (bought out) by another organization.

An acquisition means a new job, not merely a different name on paychecks.

I don’t write this to solicit sympathy as an individual, and I hold no bad feelings for the other individuals at my former workplace. One of the sad things about how “The Good Doctor” proceeded is that someone ended up being fired over the conflict, when the flaws I saw (at my former workplace, and in the fictional San Jose St. Bonaventure Hospital) didn’t relate to individuals at all.

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In the first organization I was hired into, the team was built organically. The manager was an active member of the team who also was the the one reporting to the other managers. That person had been a one-person-IT-team for a few years and finally was able to hire help.

Eventually the team became large enough that it had to have a middle-layer set up where there were team leads that supervised based on some specializations. The team leads were collaborative equals and it was quite common for myself (as officially the “Lead Systems Engineer”) to be authoring software (delegated/directed/etc by the “Lead Application Developer”) or doing metadata and data management (delegated/directed/etc collaboratively by the “Lead Metadata Architect”).

This was all consistent with the emerging IT management literature and study often discussed using the term DevOps. I had a copy of “The Phoenix Project”, in hardcover and in PDF format, and openly shared within the workplace to ensure the environment remained productive. I spoke about being part of the DevOps team early, regardless of what specific “job titles” or “job descriptions” were formally on record.

Then the merger happened in 2018. Only 2 members of the previous team (myself and the Lead Application Developer) crossed to the new organization.

I was being told to be productive, which to me meant continuing collaboration across silos as I had always done my entire career. In fact, I was hired to a contract at Agriculture Canada specifically because I didn’t see silos or bow to social hierarchies, something that the people hiring me sometimes knew from my reputation better than I understood myself. Back in 2008 I had not yet accepted the possibility of Autism, and didn’t have any language to understand any of these aspects of myself.

The new organization I was migrated to in 2018 operated under a strict hierarchy, where the different specialties that were previously collaborations amongst equals became 3 separate silos, with one of the silos even under a completely separate manager. I didn’t see this, as it is apparently not in my nature to notice silos or social hierarchies. I tried to be “productive”. My attempts to be productive were met with anger and claims I was harassing other employees, including eventually a formal accusation from management of harassment.

As far as I know I didn’t express anger on that final video call with my manager and the CEO (I only communicated in text after that), and hope that my facial expressions didn’t disclose too much. Inside I was trying not to cry.

The reason I was hired was to do sysadmin, software, and (meta)data management related work, harnessing many decades of IT sector experience. I was one-by-one told I couldn’t do software and couldn’t do metadata, as they were exclusive domains of other people. Near when I was forced on “sick leave” I was told someone else didn’t like me being their supervisor, and wanted a promotion), so I was being told I wouldn’t be doing sysadmin work.

I regularly called our team the DevOps team, and I was being told I would have a new title that had “DevOps” in the name, but it became clear that this methodology would not be allowed. The phrase was being used performatively, like several other words, to mean something else entirely.

The “unprofessional” activity that Dr. Shaun Murphy was being accused of felt familiar. The problem is the arbitrary silos created by toxic individualism and individualistic competition, and the arbitrary nature of what skills get bundled (i.e., that a surgeon needs to interact directly and alone with patients, but a pathologist does not).

These are systemic flaws in Western corporate structures, not problems with diverse people who don’t fit into those arbitrary social hierarchies. This is a problem for a wide variety of reasons, far beyond neurodivergences.

And yet – so many people, including fellow #ActuallyAutistic people, thought what the character did was unrealistic and/or showed Autistic people in a poor light.

What was unrealistic to me was the specific corporate reaction. If this were reality the series would have only had 2 seasons, and the fault would have been entirely the organizational structure and not any specific character. Instead we saw characters who understood the “value” of an individual savant, but not the structural barriers in a hyper-hierarchical and competitive workplace to participation by the diverse people needed to provide the best (and actually “productive”) collaborative environment.

While Dr. Jackson Han is being called a “Chad” in memes, I believe he was simply someone acting more loyal/patriotic to the worldviews embedded within the organizational structure of the hospital (and the USA/Canada genereally). The series strictly stays within hyper-individualistic and normative worldviews, claiming anything that goes wrong is the individual failure of someone — something I consider to be obviously false.