I followed the advice in “interviewing with autism” and it worked! When I wrote that article I was speaking from a point of self-analysis, now I speak from experience. I followed my own advice and landed a new job!
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Month: January 2022
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remailer relaying
Secure relay capability has been added to the Phantom Remailer. This feature allows a masquerading user to send messages through the remailer without needing to use a login and password. This is achieved through the use of a secret token that is known to the users of the remailer (if you choose to share it). This feature is described in the associated Github issue: https://github.com/DerPhantomCoder/remailer/issues/2
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remailer authentication
Adding anti-SPAM and abuse protection to the Phantom Remailer is the focus of my most recent commits. I created the Phantom Remailer for personal use, but when you release a piece of software to a wider audience it becomes your responsibility to ensure it is secure and robust.
The Phantom Remailer uses the Reply-To header to encode necessary meta information about the sender — while this information was encoded it was not authenticated. The design of the Phantom Remailer does not rely on storing any information about the sender or recipient on the server running the remailer so it was vulnerable to attack by crafting compatible To headers in messages addressed to the remailer.
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interviewing with autism
Being on the Autism Spectrum and being told “You are not a good cultural fit” is really difficult to process. I didn’t know I was on the spectrum when the recruiter delivered that line, but it’s what kicked off my journey of self-introspection. I interviewed with a larger social media company and thought it would be a blank canvas, some place I could do my best work and learn. What I learned is that many companies screen for people who will fit into their cliques and toe the line.
I never had a clue that I was living with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) until I started my job search. I am well into my career and have worked for a lot of different companies but have recently started looking for new opportunities. I exhibit a number of ASD traits that make interviewing difficult, which is amusing to me because until this point I’ve had a nearly 100% success rate at interviewing to offer. Jumping into a different pool, interviewing at BIG corporations instead of small companies has been an adjustment.
Here are some of the challenges I’ve had and how I’ve learned to counter them. I’ve had a number of interviews since that first BIG interview and each has been part of an iterative process — I can say with some small confidence that it wasn’t my ASD that influenced the outcome of recent interviews.