There’s a version of this post that frames neurodivergence as a gift. The hidden superpower. The secret weapon of Silicon Valley. I’ve read those posts. I understand why people write them.

I’m not going to write that post.

Not because it’s wrong — there are real cognitive advantages that come with how my brain is wired — but because the “superpower” framing skips over the cost. And the cost was real. The exhaustion was real. The years of not understanding why certain environments drained me while others didn’t — that was real too.

What I’ll say instead is this: my brain was built for systems thinking. Not because I chose it or developed it — because that’s how it works. I see patterns. I see how components connect and where the failure points are. I can hold an enormous amount of architectural complexity in my head simultaneously and navigate it without losing the thread. In thirty years of technology work, that capacity was the foundation of almost everything I built.

DevOps is, at its core, about understanding systems holistically. Not just the technical components — the pipelines, the platforms, the infrastructure — but the human systems layered on top of them. The organizational patterns. The feedback loops. The points where culture and architecture intersect. That’s not a job you do with a checklist. It requires the ability to zoom out, see the whole, and work backward to the interventions that matter.

I was good at that. I didn’t know why.

The flip side was the environments where that wiring created friction. Open offices. High-interruption cultures. Meetings that had no agenda and no outcome. Organizational politics that operated entirely on unspoken rules. Those environments didn’t just slow me down — they cost me. Every hour in a context that required me to translate and compensate was an hour I wasn’t doing the work I was actually built for.

The diagnosis didn’t change any of that. The wiring is the wiring. What it changed was my understanding of it. I stopped interpreting my need for structured environments as a personal failing and started understanding it as a design requirement. I stopped explaining away the exhaustion and started building recovery into how I work. I stopped trying to be someone who thrives in chaos and accepted that I thrive in clarity — and that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Late diagnosis does something interesting to your professional history. You go back through your career and you start to see it differently. The jobs that felt effortless — the ones where I could disappear into a problem for ten hours and come up for air having built something that worked — weren’t effortless because I was lucky. They were effortless because the environment matched the wiring. The jobs that felt like survival weren’t hard because I was failing. They were hard because I was constantly translating.

Knowing that now doesn’t change the past. But it changes how I think about the future. About the work I choose to take on. About the environments I build for the people I lead. About what it actually means to enable someone to do their best work — which sometimes means understanding that best work doesn’t always look the same.

I built a career with a brain I didn’t fully understand. Imagine what becomes possible when you do.

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Thin Ice: Survival, Identity, and Learning Who I Was All Along — available now. Get the book →