Bill Gates Asperger’s?
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007Until the end, I was thinking no.
It’s a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger’s domain. Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger’s syndrome “the engineers’ disorder.” Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov’s father told me that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers “could be diagnosed with ODD - they’re odd.” In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland observes, “I think all tech people are slightly autistic.” Source
Many articles and blogs reference the possibility of Bill Gates as having Asperger’s Syndrome but it is a spectrum disorder. I think we can look at anyone and declare, "ah ha! You did ___ so you have it too!" and I think that people in extraordinary circumstances, be it special needs like Asperger’s or needing a wheelchair or deaf or whatever the case, find comfort in associating with celebrities in the same situation. And that is ok because we all need our heroes!