When German software giant SAP said last month it plans to employ hundreds of autistic people as information-technology experts, the news was welcomed, especially at a small Berlin computer consulting firm.
The pioneering company, Auticon, already employs 17 people who live with autism, the disorder characterized by difficulties with social interactions and exceptional abilities in specific fields.
“Many people say that if a company like SAP said it makes sense ... it’s very good for us,” Auticon chief executive Dirk Mueller-Remus said. “That means it’s something serious, solid.”
SAP, which makes business software, said last month that after pilot projects in India and Ireland, it plans to employ hundreds of people with autism as software testers and programmers.
Its goal is that by 2020, people with autism will make up 1 percent of its worldwide workforce of 65,000.
Mueller-Remus created his far smaller company in November 2011 with the idea of “investing in the strengths” of these potential employees. His son was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a variant of autism, as a teenager, and Mueller-Remus has long known that many people with autism excel in fields like programming or quality control.
“This is my talent,” one of the employees, 27-year-old Melanie Altrock, said while sitting at her screen in a white-walled, modern top-floor office in western Berlin.
“Other people are interested in languages or math, for me it’s computers. I don’t just search for errors, I see them,” she said.
Auticon now has 25 staff and offices in Berlin, Munich and Dusseldorf, with plans for another in Hamburg.
It looks to break even “by the end of the year,” Mueller-Remus said.
“We wanted a normal consulting company, without subsidies, without donations, without funding from a foundation,” he said, adding that the aim was to “combine social commitment and business.”
“Today, after a little over a year, we have good customers like Vodafone, it’s looking good,” Mueller-Remus said.
However, he also emphasized that working with autistic people can be “a very complex issue.”
“We can make many mistakes because people with Asperger’s are very demanding,” he said.
“People with autism are very concrete, unequivocal,” said Elke Seng, a “job coach” at Auticon who assists the employees in their relationships at work and with clients.
“There is no innuendo, there is only one or zero. It’s rather nice,” she said.
“Only 5 to 10 percent of people affected by autism find a place on the regular job market,” Federal Association for the Development of People with Autism board member Friedrich Nolte said.
Mueller-Remus said that “their CVs often have brief episodes of work interspersed with long interruptions.”
Often people with autism “have no situational awareness, may seem arrogant, have no interest in small talk, and are not interested in people because people are not logical,” he said.
All of this can give rise to misunderstandings with sometimes serious consequences, he said.
“That more people with autism can access a job is simply fantastic,” said Seng, who added that she finds her work “fascinating.”
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the