Michael Hargreaves said:

In fact, it's estimated that there are around 820,000 neurodiverse engineers working in the industry in the UK alone.

Might we have a reference for that please? The working population is only 32 million and according to the ONS there are only 491,128 engineers. Source

In my experience it's usually the neurotypicals not in engineering that cause the greater problems ;-)
M

Andy Millar said:

what I want is not to sit through an hour video for 10 minutes of the information which I'm actually after

It's the Youtube generation!

Engineering Council say that "The UK’s engineering workforce is over 5.5 million people". https://www.engc.org.uk/news/press-releases/pr2020/engineering-makes-up-18-of-the-uk-working-population/

We could get into a debate about "Engineers" and "Engineering workforce", but to be honest it doesn't matter much. Anyone who's worked in engineering management / leadership will be aware that there is a problem (even if they're not clear what the problem is or why, which is what Foothold are trying to address).

Oh Mike...you have no idea (actually you probably do  ) how much of my life as an ISA I spend jumping up and down in front of engineering teams - sometimes literally - saying "you can't just say 'well the user shouldn't do that' when you should have someone on your team who knows the user IS going to do that!" Actually my favourite is when you get two engineering teams, one being the "end user" for the other, and neither of whom can get into the head of the other. Absolute classic being designers and installers / maintainers. I often use as an example the HAZID where we identified a hazard that loose equipment covers were unacceptable as they could get swept up by a passing train and very horrible things could happen. The designers' answer was that they would write in the manual that covers must be securely replaced after maintenance. A good old maintainer there put it bluntly: "write what you like, if it's two o'clock in the morning, and p***ing down with freezing rain, they're going to just sling the covers in the ditch at the end of the job and sign off".

What I've always found interesting is getting mixed teams together of some engineers who are, shall we say, very focussed on engineering and come up with brilliant solutions, some who are very focussed on engineering in a different way and will pedantically step through the solutions to find the holes, and some who are really good at getting into the end users' head so that the end solution is actually useful to someone. And then the real fun of getting all those engineers to respect each other's strengths (which of course is where having some understanding of neurodiversity, whether by name or not, is really useful). And yes there have been times when I've had to literally stop fights breaking out between two engineers because one couldn't understand why the other was thinking the way they were...as indeed we see on these forums!

So I'd say, to take the old marketing cliché, for "problems", read "opportunities" ;-)

Ah well, I'm not going to deliberately put things  on the forum that identify people places or events., but yes having users, either real ones, or dummy ones who you ask to  press the buttons in the wrong order, switch kit off by unplugging it suddenly or drop the small non captive parts into the long grass at A model or design review saves  a lot of expense later. It is cheaper to fix stuff on the drawings than it  is to modify it in production, than it is to do a recall after there are problems in service.
In that sense my inability to follow instructions in any given sequence more than a few times before boredom means I do not, is a very useful debugging skill. (' how do we get back from here ? How on earth did you get it into this state? I almost followed the instructions but I was thinking of something else ...)

I also think that part of any would be engineer's education should include some sort of field work, of the kind where it all goes horribly wrong. The reason I walk into meetings with pockets full of useful stuff like I'm about to do a Paul Daniels magic trick comes from lessons learnt  walking back the full length of the airtstrip to get a pen, or climbing back down something tall to get a pair of pliers or a cable tie or something. Designing assuming a single track to success is easy, planning to gracefully handle all the alternatives is generally not.

Actually my 'neurotypical' jibe also can be applied to some managerial types as well as the users !

And yes, almost nothing can be fixed in the manual, except perhaps liability, and even then only to a limited extent.

Mike

Andy, thank you. 18% does seem rather a lot, but as you say, it depends upon the definition.

I'm going throw in an idea, but a lot of people aren't going to like it. Being a "good" Engineer requires a considerable degree of neurodiversity, because otherwise everyone could do it (which they can't). My partner says that "I am not in her world, or the world" depending, but she is fanatically tidy and thinks this makes everything else unnecessary. I admit to appearing eccentric to some, and largely unbelievable to others, because I am sure my brain is differently wired to theirs, and I see through and understand many things that they do not. I don't understand Shakespeare, general poetry or stiff prose, but a good scientific paper, or a complex textbook is just fine. The inventiveness necessary in good Engineering is easy for me, but my colleagues have this noted as a curious trait, which they cannot achieve. Why any of this happens is a mystery to me, but I am quite content. I have discovered over many years that these things are not liked by everyone, they find it challenging when their plan is shown to be many times more complex than necessary, or to not work at all. I have been called all kinds of things, some of them even moderately polite, but Boffin is probably better than Nerd.

"Neurodiverse" is one of those terms which seems to be increasingly widely interpreted, which is a shame. The original (mid-1990s) term was "neurotypical", which was used in a faintly pejorative way to describe the majority of the population.

Perhaps David is saying that we need plenty of Aspergic people in engineering, only you cannot say that any more 'cos Herr Asperger's associations with the Nazis have put him in the dog house.

Being highly systematic must be an advantage in engineering and who cares if an engineer is short on empathy - machines don't have feelings.

In fact, I don't like all these labels, but why should somebody who is dyspraxic be an engineer? Motor dyspraxia is hardly compatible with being a toolmaker, and ideational dyspraxia could be a severe problem for a professional engineer. I'd love to be good at high jump, but I am too short (and fat); or painting (though I got the top grade in my technical drawing O-level); I wouldn't know where to start with poetry; and I'd make a pretty poor living as a musician (though I can sing).

So let's take people as they are and accept that we are all good at some things and not so good at others and leave it at that. But that's me being old fashioned again.