@jeff

I had to re-read the editorial to make sure I wasn't arguing that it was OK to hire people who were so socially inept as to be unemployable. (although Alan Turing came close at times!) Sorry if I gave that impression. I was attempting to argue that we were making it increasingly harder for a large chunk of perfectly normal people to engage in IT teamwork within offices. Many factors are conspiring to make it so. The architecture, general office conventions, and development methodologies. The development methodologies are requiring particularly keen social skills. This has required an increasing emphasis on 'soft' skills that are subjective and difficult to measure. It becomes a matter of opinion and, too often, prejudice. I believe that rejecting a suitably qualified person purely for reasons of 'cultural fit' were wrong. It is such a vague term that it could merely give a polite veneer to the prejudices of the company doing the recruiting. It worries me greatly that developers are becoming increasingly homogeneous, many departments are staffed almost entirely by twenty-something males. I wasn't always like that. We should accommodate our work practices to make sure that we don't exclude perfectly normal people from the workplace on the grounds that 'they wouldn't fit in'.

I once wrote

'the best development teams I’ve worked on embraced the whole gamut of humanity – a wild mix of cultures, sexuality, motivation, age and beliefs, spiced with maverick spirits and eccentrics. The result being that everyone was jolted out of their complacency, both professionally and personally, and learned to challenge assumptions rather than accept them.'

I still stand by that opinion.

https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/two-stops-short-of-dagenham/