alt Hacker NewsIs this just from your direct experience or do you have data to back that up? Are you talking about credentialed engineering like mechanical or civil engineering or just software developers?
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There's plenty of data on the clustering of high-functioning autistic workers in engineering and computer science, and the massively disproportionate share of autistic children with fathers and grandfathers in those fields. I work across technical and non-technical academic fields and the difference is quite obvious. It also follows naturally from some of the common presentations of autism, e.g., the high co-occurrence of dyslexia.
There's this trend on the internet to attribute success at any remotely technically challenging problem to the glorious power of autism.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/ (if "strong affinity" means "bimodal distribution and I ignore the lower pole")
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38497251/ (if "engineering and computer science" means "IT")
I don't know if it's actually true but the idea is interesting.