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Conor Bronsdon for LinearB

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at devinterrupted.com

Why an Autistic Developer is Your Next Great Hire w/ Matt Nigh of UW Medicine

Like most fast-growing companies, LinearB spends WAY too much time trying to hire developers.

So when we came across a brilliant article about hiring autistic talent, we knew we had to have its author Matt Nigh on the podcast. Matt is one of the most prominent thought leaders on neurodiversity in the workplace.

Matt himself was diagnosed with autism late in life following a very unique job interview at Google. He’s since spent countless hours researching, writing and talking about how companies can not only bring neurodiverse talent into the fold, but why engineering teams thrive when they do.

In this episode of Dev Interrupted we talk with Matt about best practices in recruiting, hiring and working with neurodiverse coders, how his interview at Google interview led to an autism diagnosis, the ways Matt’s data team at the University of Washington is helping combat COVID and what private companies can learn from the ROI metrics of universities and public institutions.

Dan and Matt also took some time to geek out about GitLab.

We hope this conversation was as enlightening for you as it was for us and we hope it helps you find your next great hire.

Episode Highlights Include:

  • How Matt’s autism diagnosis changed his career
  • Hiring neurodiverse talent
  • Inclusive interview best practices for neurodiverse candidates
  • ROI metrics: public sector vs private sector
  • UW’s data team and its efforts to combat COVID

You're Invited to INTERACT on April 7th

Join engineering leaders from Netflix, Slack, Stack Overflow, American Express & more at LinearB's virtual engineering leadership conference, INTERACT on April 7th, 2022.

1 day, 20 speakers, 1,000s of engineering leaders - all driven by the Dev Interrupted community. If you are a team lead, engineering manager, VP or CTO looking to improve your team, this is the conference for you!

Learn more here

Join INTERACT at https://devinterrupted.com/event/interact/

Top comments (2)

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quackson666 profile image
Quackson

Fantastic episode across the board! So many cool insights

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nobilitypnw profile image
NOBILITYPNW

Matt is an awesome storyteller - thanks for having him on the podcast! It's really nice to see him have a platform to talk about such an important topic(s).