Neurodivergent, Neurotypical, and the EQ Problem in High Tech

I am writing this after a podcast recording where the host asked me, point blank, whether neurodivergent people in cybersecurity should have to learn emotional intelligence. The implication was that maybe we should not. Maybe the wiring is the wiring, the work gets done, and the soft skills are someone else's problem.

I have written a whole book on the opposite of that argument, The Smartest Person in the Room. But the honest version of my answer is more interesting than the book's marketing copy, because I suspect I am neurodivergent myself. I have many of the traits. I have sat at a computer for months with almost no human contact and felt fine. I have walked into rooms full of people and wanted to leave. I have been the technically right person in a meeting who lost the room and could not figure out why.

So when I argue that engineers and operators in high tech need to learn EQ, I am not arguing from the outside. I am arguing from the inside, about myself.

The Three Groups, Honestly

The debate usually gets framed as neurodivergent versus neurotypical, with diverse teams as a separate HR topic. That framing is wrong, and it lets everyone off the hook.

Neurodivergent operators, the ADHD, autistic, dyslexic, AuDHD profiles that show up disproportionately in cybersecurity and engineering, tend to be very good at the deep work the job actually requires. Pattern recognition across thousands of log lines. Holding a system model in your head for weeks. Tolerating tedium that would break a more socially calibrated brain. The gap is usually in the connective tissue; reading the room, knowing when to stop talking, understanding why a stakeholder is upset about something that is not what they are saying they are upset about.

Neurotypical operators are not magically good at EQ. They are just better at hiding the gap because the social mirror is working. They get more feedback in real time, so they course-correct without knowing they are doing it. Put them in front of an unfamiliar audience, a hostile board, or a grieving employee and the same gaps show up. They just have not been told that the gaps are gaps.

Mixed teams, which is most teams in tech, fail in a third way. The neurodivergent people get labeled difficult. The neurotypical people get labeled shallow. Neither label is true, and both labels stop the work.

The Real Question Is Not Whether, It Is For What

The question "do neurodivergent people have to learn EQ" is the wrong question. The right question is, what is the specific EQ skill the job requires, and is it learnable.

The answer is yes, and it is the same answer for everyone. EQ in a technical career is not about becoming chatty at the holiday party. It is about a small list of concrete skills.

• Noticing when the person across from you has stopped listening, and stopping when they have.
• Translating a technical reality into the language the decision-maker can act on.
• Asking one clarifying question before defending your design.
• Saying I do not know without it costing you status.
• Catching your own frustration before it shows up as contempt.

None of those require a neurotypical brain. They require a system. That is what the Secure Methodology in the book is, a system for engineers and operators who were not born with the social mirror dialed in. It is five skills, in order, that compound. It works for me. It works for the technical leaders I coach, most of whom would tick at least a few neurodivergent boxes if they were honest.

Why High Tech Punishes the Gap

The industry rewards the deep-focus trait, then punishes the communication gap, then promotes you into a job that is almost entirely the communication gap. That is the trap.

The engineer who can hold the whole system in their head gets made a tech lead. The tech lead who can run a clean incident review gets made a director. The director who can sit across from a regulator or a board and not flinch gets made a VP. At every step, the percentage of the job that is technical goes down, and the percentage that is EQ goes up. The people who refuse to learn EQ either get stuck at a level that frustrates them, or get pushed into a level that breaks them. I have watched both happen, many times.

This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one. The job changes. The skills have to change with it.

Should Neurodivergent People Be Exempt

No. And I say that as someone who would happily take the exemption if it existed.

The argument for exemption usually goes, the wiring is hard to change, the social work is exhausting, and the technical contribution is the reason you were hired. All three are true. None of them add up to an exemption, because the people on the other side of every conversation, the customers, the patients in the case of medical devices, the colleagues, the regulators, do not get to opt out of the consequences when the communication fails.

In cybersecurity specifically, the communication failure is the breach. The wrong sentence in a board deck is the reason the budget gets cut and the controls get downgraded. The shut-down body language in a vendor review is the reason the bad supplier gets through. The contempt for the non-technical stakeholder is the reason they stop bringing you problems early, and you find out about them late.

The EQ skills are not a nice-to-have layered on top of the technical work. They are the load-bearing wall that keeps the technical work from being wasted.

What This Looks Like Day to Day

For me, it looks like this. I batch deep work into long uninterrupted blocks because that is how my brain actually produces. I script the openings of hard conversations before I have them, because the script frees me up to listen during the conversation instead of rehearsing. I run a short reflection at the end of every week, the kind I wrote about in Reflection Is Part of the Messy and Uncomfortable Growth Process, to catch the moments where I went quiet or got sharp, and to figure out what set it off.

I do not pretend to be a neurotypical extrovert. I do not try. The version of EQ I am trying to build is the one that works with the brain I have, not against it.

That is the version I think is worth teaching. It is also the version most of high tech does not teach, which is why the gap stays open and why the smartest person in the room keeps losing arguments they should have won.

If you want the full system, that is what The Smartest Person in the Room is for. If you want the short version, it is this. The wiring is not the problem, and it is not the excuse. The skill is learnable. Do the work.