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The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.
Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.
The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.
I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.
And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.
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