Q&A with Sam Bankman-Fried:

Neurodiversity at Work—Perspectives on Leadership, Inclusion, and Growth

This interview features Sam Bankman-Fried, a neurodivergent and justice-involved individual diagnosed with ASD who has led teams in technology and finance sectors. His experiences navigating workplace challenges, networking, giving presentations and taking high-pressure meetings while neurodivergent, as well as being a justice-involved individual, offer valuable insights as part of a program to bring in diverse and unique perspectives aligned with Work First Foundation's mission to support both communities. This conversation focuses on practical strategies for workplace success, managing neurodivergent traits in professional settings, and building inclusive environments.

Part 1: Personal Experience with Neurodivergence

How would you describe yourself?

Introverted, right-brained, Aspy, neurodivergent, anhedonic.

You are diagnosed with ASD and identify as Aspy. How did you succeed?

I have my strengths and weaknesses. I had a series of jobs that emphasized the strengths—quantitative thinking, for instance.

I had to work to get better at my weaknesses—and pissed some people off while getting there.

What weaknesses?

I think the biggest difficulty for me has always been interfacing with other people's emotions at work.

For instance, when I was first interning at Jane Street—a quant trading firm—I'd get carried away sometimes focusing on some logical point, and not realize until too late that I'd likely been insensitive to a colleague. I got feedback about that, and over time I was mostly able to turn that weakness into a strength by constantly reminding myself to think about each interaction from others' points of view as well. What are they likely to be sensitive to? What is important for them to hear, and what do I need to be careful about?

In addition to defaulting to a logical—instead of emotional—style of interaction, I'm also naturally introverted. The combination of those means that I often found it difficult to give employees the emotional feedback that they needed. I could do it in short bursts, but ran out of social energy quickly; and my experience was that about half the time an employee wanted to talk to me, it was for emotional affirmation rather than informative purposes.

In particular, this lead to me giving positive feedback a lot less than I should. Internally, I often defaulted to assuming that if there was a problem I should address it, and if not then I had nothing useful to add. But that meant I mostly gave negative feedback, and didn't bother with encouragement.

Ultimately, I forced myself to keep a log of times I'd expressed gratitude. Every week or so, I'd set aside a few hours and send a few employees positive feedback. It wasn't perfect—it was a bit of a crutch to cover for my limited social energy—but it worked relatively well.

What about eye contact? I heard you had to work at that. Does it tire you out?

Yeah, I also find things like eye contact and facial expressions difficult. No matter what I'm feeling internally, my face doesn't naturally reflect it—so I've had to train myself to make my facial expressions match my emotions and what I'm trying to convey.

It's hard for me to overstate the impact of that. I was pretty surprised at it myself—people react very differently if you're smiling. It's a way to convey non-threatening intent in a conversation that is much more instinctively powerful than any amount of words can be.

I found something similar with eye contact. I always worried it was a bit invasive, in a sense, but at the end of the day it's expected. It took some work to figure out approximately the right amount of it, and—like facial expressions—I still find that my eye contact falls away when I'm too socially exhausted.

Part 2: Navigating the Workplace with Neurodivergence

You've spoken about having a more logic-driven cognitive style. What do you mean by that?

Let's say a colleague who you don't get along with proposes a new office policy.

The 'emotion-driven cognitive style' would probably start out by thinking—'well, screw that guy and his dumb policies'.

The 'logic driven cognitive style' might start out by asking—'well, does the proposed policy make sense, ignoring the fact that your enemy suggested it? If so, then maybe you've been too harsh on the colleague—even if they are mean to you. If not, then you can speak out against the policy.'

Of course, that's an example where the 'logic' driven style is probably the better one. A flip side might be—you're driving home on the night of your anniversary, and you have just enough time on your way back to either go to the gas station and deal with the blinking 'check oil' light in your car, or to go to the florist and get some roses for your partner—but not both.

The logical cognitive style might analyze those, and think—well, it's urgent to deal with the 'check oil' light, maybe the car will break otherwise—that would cost $20k! On the other hand, you can always get roses tomorrow.' The emotional cognitive style, instead, might anticipate the disappointment from you partner if you don't get flowers, and the love if you do—and so stop by the florist.

Here, perhaps the emotional cognitive style is right! But that doesn't mean logic doesn't work. It's just that the direct logical thought process was not, in fact, fully logical, because it missed the biggest factor: the impact of your choice on your partner's emotions. The full logical process there is to take others' emotions into account when balancing your options.

You've worked with a lot of people who were also on the autism spectrum or neurodiverse. What patterns or strengths did you notice?

The neurodiverse are often pretty good at ignoring all the noise, and quickly—and accurately—analyzing the underlying problems. They tend to be good at using logic-driven cognitive styles, and good at figuring out when conventional wisdom is correct—and when it's not.

For instance, in the first example above—when analyzing the policy proposal, they are likely to actually figure out whether that proposal is correct, rather than letting their emotions about the person proposing it cloud their judgement.

I've been consistently surprised at how frequently a large group of smart people can get distracted by emotional tangents and fail to see clearly what's right in front of them—and how a small group of logical thinkers can out-think the conventional wisdom.

For someone who is autistic and entering the workforce, what strategies might help them find roles where their strengths are recognized and valued?

To a large extent, this is a combination of (4), (5), and (10)—so I'll take on those.

Are there employer accommodations or styles that you found most effective?

One of the most frustrating experiences in corporate America is to know what the right decision for the company to make is—to have a really compelling logical argument for it—and be completely unable to convince your boss, or some committee, or whatever is in power. This is especially frustrating for people who are neurodivergent.

There are lots of reasons this can happen, but one common cause—especially for people on the spectrum—is when they're approaching a problem logically, their manager isn't.

All of which is to say: for a lot of neurodivergent people, one of the most important things is to find employers—and managers—who will understand and respect your thinking style, and will either think similarly, or at least acknowledge the power of it and take it seriously even when they have different instincts.

How can someone on the spectrum go about finding a mentor, and what qualities should they look for in that relationship?

There are two primary things I'd look for in a mentor. The first is basically just the above—find someone who will take you seriously even when most people disagree with you.

The second thing is to find someone who can help smooth out your rough edges. This is something I had to teach myself to do—though I had some help with it. It means finding a mentor who:

• (a) understands what your roughest edges are
• (b) doesn't get frustrated with them or dismiss you because of them
• (c) gives you practical tips on how to manage them in the workplace

What do you see as the biggest barriers to hiring neurodivergent candidates?

There are a few jobs—computer programmers, for instance—for which you can somewhat directly test for aptitude when hiring. Even there it's limited, though, and for most jobs no interviews really do a good job of testing how competent an employee would be.

Which means that, at the end of the day, a lot of hiring decisions come down to social factors. Do the interviewers enjoy chatting with the interviewee? Do they have mutual friends?

Those metrics tend to be ones that favor extroverted, highly social people, and disadvantage neurodivergent.

Autistic workers may struggle with unspoken social expectations or office politics. Was that a problem for you? What advice do you have for the employees or their bosses?

Yeah, social dynamics at work can definitely be tough. I know I pissed some people off when I first started working, before I learned how to interface better with colleagues.

There are a bunch of different things that can help; probably the most important is kindness. For neurodivergent employees—find ways to express that you think a colleague is wrong without offending them.

Say you're advocating for LMN, and it seems logical to you; your colleague Bob is advocating for ABC, and it seems mostly irrational.

Start by acknowledging their perspective, and make it clear that it might have significant merit. (Something can have significant merit and still be overcome by other factors!) For instance, saying things like: 'Bob makes some good points here; ABC are important factors, and I definitely missed some of them until he pointed them out.'

Then make your core point: 'I also think that XYZ are important, and suggest we should do LMN. Here's why I think that we should do LMN.'

But find some way to build at least a little bit of the other perspective into the answer—some place where it does make sense, even if it's not important, and where it will make Bob feel heard and respected and let him buy into the full proposed plan as partially his own creation, rather than a rejection of his ideas: 'but, of course, it's important to keep ABC in mind, as Bob said, and because of that maybe we should do DEF if QRS happens.'

And in general—just being kind and supportive can be a big help. So, frankly, does smiling and making eye contact (but not too much!)—and generally making it clear to colleagues that you're trying to work cooperatively/constructively with them, rather than competitively.

You don't have to radically change your personality or anything—if you're introverted you don't need to spend hours per day on small talk that is nothing but a stresser. But if you can train yourself to do a little bit of it, it can help a lot.

Did you have a different style of feedback for those on the spectrum? You've led large teams. What advice would you give to other managers about supporting neurodiverse employees without making assumptions or being patronizing?

If you're the boss of a neurodivergent employee—do what you can to help the employee learn how to interact well with colleagues, and accept that it might never be perfect. Play the above role if they don't—smooth out their proposals to make them more socially palatable, and if another employee gets frustrated, remind them that it isn't personal—it's just how they interact with others.

And then, after an incident, sit down the neurodivergent employee and explain—without condescending—some tip for the future. 'Yeah, I know it seems arbitrary, but as it turns out Bob—like some other employees—generally reacts poorly to any suggestion unless it includes some compliment for his ideas. So in the future, before you propose something to the whole team, take 10 minutes and see if there's a way to build a little bit of Bob's ideas into it, in a way that won't actively hurt the overall plan; hopefully he'll be much more amenable to it then.'

If you were designing a workforce training or placement program specifically for autistic adults, what would be the key features—and how would success be measured?

If I were designing a training program I would really focus on social skills. They're incredibly important to being effective in the workplace; they're often arbitrary; and even for someone who is not naturally very social, they can be learned. Or at the very least, you can learn heuristics that can help smooth things out a lot.

Like making sure to be respectful towards ideas, even if they're dumb, without giving in on what's important. Recognizing times when people are expecting social interaction, and when they're just expecting quiet.

And learning how to preemptively defuse potentially tense situations—even just prefacing things you're nervous might piss people off by saying 'you know, here's a random idea—but I could be totally wrong on this! What might it be missing?' or 'hey, would this meeting be a good time to bring up XYZ, or are we running low on time?'