You Need Some Neurosparkle In Your Cybersecurity Team

Hi everyone. Uh welcome to our talk. We are happy to have you all here. We're gonna go ahead and get right into it because there is plenty to talk about. So our kind of flow today we're going to introduce ourselves of course and then we're going to talk at a high level what is neurodeiversity get into the neurodeiverse perspective within cyber security and then some wrapups of what you should take away from this talk. So to get started, my name is Megan Rody Fonka. I am a security engineer at Data Dog right now focusing on detection engineering and threat hunting. I am autistic as well as ADHD. So as Hannah Montana said, I've got the best of both worlds. And if you

want to ask me about my hobbies, I love to give someone something everyone something to talk about if you want to hit up later. I am a martial artist and a hobby farmer, hence the jiu-jitsu sweatshirt and the goat. Her name's Her name's Venus, by the way. >> That's fantastic. How's it going, folks? My name is Carson Zimmerman. Um, I'm at Microsoft. Uh, don't ask me what my title is. I'm not really sure. Uh, it's principal something or other. And if you know me really well, you know that there's about 10 jokes behind that one. Um, I have ADHD. Uh, and I am a big-time amateur photographer. Uh, if you look me up on Google, uh, you may see that I

wrote a few books. Don't read the first one. It's old. And if you see the second one, 11 strategies, don't buy it. It's free and worth every penny. Megan. >> So, just a couple disclaimers here. We before we get started, we are not mental health professionals. We are not speaking from a professional standpoint. We are not going to diagnose you. We are just here sharing our experiences as neurodiverse people within the industry. If you listen to this talk and you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's me." Then go find professional help. We're going to provide some resources at the end for you to look that up. And with that, we're going to move into our section on what is neurodeiversity.

Carson? >> Yep. So, neurodeiversity is the concept that there are differences in our brain function. Um, we include autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and dyslexia are natural variations. In fact, I don't really like using the term disorder. Um, instead, if you click again, you can think about um, our brains, the different brains in this room run different operating systems. Some run Linux, some run Mac, some run Windows, some a really old version of Eric's. >> Yeah, we're all nerds here. Um, so we're going to treat different situations differently. And the thesis of our talk is that those divergence and diversity and how our brains approach different problems are as much a feature if not more than a bug.

>> Yeah. So why is this relevant to cyber security? It's because cyber security teams thrive with neurodeiverse individuals on them. However, the workflows, the communication, the normal business functions are designed for those who are neurotypical. So, this clash creates a lot of burnout. It reduces the success of teams and it's the reason we're here speaking to you today so that you can understand how you can change the work environment to support all these different times of thinking. Would if you're comfortable, please raise your hand if you're here because you are neurodeiverse. like most of you don't. >> H Yeah, that's a lot of you. So, and I bet if I asked for who knows someone

neurodyiverse, we'd get a 100% here. So, I'm glad to hear you all are coming to learn from our experiences. So, I'm going to let Carson speak from his uh expertise. >> I will. So, um attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, previously known as just ADD, back in the 90s, many of you probably first heard of ADD. Technically, the term ADD doesn't exist anymore. It's all rolled up under ADHD. Now, this um core of the neurodiversity primarily affects executive function. Hold one because we're going to talk about executive function, but that includes things like managing our thoughts and our actions and how we respond to situations. And yes, focus is a big piece of it, but it's not all of

it. It's it is characterized by inattention. And if you read any pop culture, etc., you're going to see that it includes hyperactivity, includes impulsivity, but that's the tip of the iceberg. Um, what it isn't is it's not a lack of willpower. And this is actually one of the biggest friction points when we work with people who have ADHD is it's like, why didn't you just do blank? Like, why didn't you just shut up then? Why didn't you just do blank? Well, sometimes our brains aren't wired that way. It's not just about being hyper. People with ADHD may have that strong that those traits very strongly but not actually show that hyperactivity piece. It's a spectrum of

things. And it's not just for kids. Again, ADHD, if you go and read the news, um most of us learned about this back in the 90s in the early mostly um associated with young boys, adolescent boys. Guess what, folks? ADHD um shows differently in males and females. Now, what it doesn't um now let's talk a little bit more. Um it time may not feel linear sometimes. Let me give you an example. I'll be like, "Hey honey, let me do this. It only take me 15 minutes." And then three hours later I'm like, "God, that was really easy and fast." She's like, "It's 7:00. I'm hungry. Why aren't we at dinner?" Um memory drops when things leave view.

It's like, "Hey, hey, honey, don't forget your kings. Turn around." Wait, what did you just say? This is all the time. Emotions hit and fade fast. Um, again, I'm going to keep talking about my wife who is very wonderful and very kind person. I definitely married up. Yes, this is being recorded. And she says, "I have two modes. Heck yeah." And oh, heck, except with with a very different word than that. Um, so task initiation is binary. Things can feel very impossible until they're effortless. So, for example, when we were creating these slides, it's like, oh, I'd sit there for like hours like, oh, oh, what am I going to do for these slides? And then boom, they're done in

like an hour. >> These are some of the traits. >> So, moving on to kind of my perspective, I'm definitely more affected by my autism than my ADHD. uh autism spectrum disorder and now includes things like Asberers. If you want to Google why we don't say Asperers anymore, look up who Hans Asperger is. So when it comes to autism spectrum disorder, it primarily affects how I perceive the world, how autistic people perceive the world and interact with other people. It's very different. That's why it feels very different interacting with someone who has autism. So, some of these things are that you may see are challenges with social communication, challenges with sensory processing, which I'll talk

about a lot, and then just processing information. We think about things differently. So, the way we process information is different. Now, what it isn't is it's not a linear spectrum. So historically, people look at autism as a long line and there's low functioning and there's high functioning and you fall somewhere between those two places. That is not how autistic people like to be categorized. Looking at me, most people would say I'm very high functioning. You do not see the number of medications I take in the morning and how I am when I unmask and I sit at home and I'm able to act like I want to act. you haven't seen when I was a child,

pre-diagnosis, premedication, when I was having meltdowns, even as an adult, kicking holes in walls. Like, those are the things that I hide that for the sake of the neurotypical community, for the sake of living in a world that is not designed for me. But people consider that means I'm high functioning. And it's not the same. We just have different skills in different areas. So, some people with autism, they have great social skills, but they don't have good sensory processing. Or they have terrible social skills or nonverbal, but they're very intelligent and have a high IQ when it comes to their areas of specialty. The other thing is we have a lot of women who are diagnosed middle-aged

despite the signs in the rest of their life because the diagnostic criteria and how autism manifests is very focused on boys and males versus girls. It presents very very differently. And so it's been very hard historically to get a diagnosis as a female because it does not look the same as the more common uh male diagnosis. So what this looks like when it comes to me is that I am very good at direct communication. What that means is I say what I think. That can be both a positive and a negative. I remember um when I was at IBM, I changed teams and not long after someone messaged me and they said, "Man, it really sucks not

having you on our team anymore because you're the only one who would tell everybody what you we all were thinking and say it out loud." So, this has both helped me and harmed me in my career. I like this because for me, I need that clarity. So, I also expect that in return and that's why I communicate like that. social cues. They're also processed more consciously. What you're doing or what I am trying to do, that takes thought. Things like eye contact. That's simple and innate for neurotypical people. You look at someone when you've talked, that is what you learn from when you're young. That makes sense. When I need to maintain eye contact, in my head, I'm like, "Eye

contact, eye contact, eye contact." I actually probably miss 50% of what you're saying because I'm thinking about the fact I need to maintain eye contact and is this too much eye contact? Have I blinked enough? Should I look away for a second? Like it's a whole process in my head. Whereas if people were just comfortable with me looking down or looking to the side and focusing on listening, that would actually be a better outcome. But I've been told eye contact. I've been trained since I was young. So, that's something I've learned to do that a lot of autistic people don't learn to do and is considered often rude because you're not paying attention. But for me, I don't see why

looking at your face indicates whether I'm paying attention. I can get hyperfocused on things just like we'll see with ADHD. When I'm in the zone, I will focus hard and I am very precise with my work. But when things change or um are not routine for me, that's where you'll see a lot of my struggle. I try to make things predictable. Just this week, I was trying to perform one threat hunt. I had been planning it for months. I was ready. We kicked off. 12 hours into it, I get a message from my manager. Hey, you have to go do this other hunt. And I like I was spiraling. Like it was all sarcastic comments in every channel. I

had to apologize yesterday and be like I was just struggling a bit there. So I try to have a level of predict predictability. Many autistic kids you'll see there's a big focus on trying to give routine to their lives because that's just how we end up functioning better. All right. Uh Carson, you want to take over? Oh, sorry. I'll take this slide. My bad. So in the next few slides, we're going to take a key aspect of really functioning in general, but things that are very specific, and we're going to go into what are our strengths. We don't want to focus on weaknesses. So these can be weaknesses, but our whole point of our talk is to reframe things for you

when it comes to neurodeiversity in the workplace. We're going to talk about why it's relevant to the sock that most of us are working on security teams. So this will help think about that. uh than what the superpower is that comes out of this. So for strengths in both ADHD and ASD there's hyperfocus. A lot of people think with ADHD attention deficit means that we can't pay attention. And it's not that. It's we can't pay attention to something that doesn't hold our focus. But if we find something that holds our focus, it's hyperfocus. And then as said with autism, for me, I have I enjoy repetition. So I would rather do the same task a million times

than change task regularly. That is more common to autism versus ADHD. And honestly, that's a great thing for the work because most neurotypicals don't want to do the same boring thing a million times. So I am happy to take that load off of everyone. At most of my jobs in life, I have taken on the task that is me just doing the same thing over and over again because I enjoy that. And so how this helps in the sock this deep focus allows for deep investigations whether it's incidents or threat research and we are always trying to learn and expand our knowledge. So that allows for a the to be able to thrive in those sock areas. And then

when it comes to our superpower, what does this mean? It means we will not give up till we figure it out. Now, yes, we have issues with attention. It may take may take us some time to learn something, but that's just because our attention is scarce. Um, and not because it's scarce, but because it's misallocated. We aren't having our attention put towards things that will give us that ability to focus. Um, so I'm going to talk about cautions and tips, but before I do, I want to tell two very short stories. So, I was working I just got a 3D printer, by the way. Anybody 3D printer nerds here? Yeah. >> Lot built your 3D printer. That was fun,

right? My kid and I built ours. That was a lot of fun. So, I was actually I had opened up Fusion for the first time last weekend and it was like 4:00 in the afternoon. I'm like, "Yeah, man. I'm going to turn this one model. I'm going to have made two tweaks to it. It's going to take me 15 minutes and I'm going to figure it out and it's going to be amazing and then I can have a proper phone holder in my car. And then after 4 hours after I was supposed to be doing on these slides, I was like, "Shit, it's 7:00. I'm really hungry. I haven't even figured it out. I'm mentally crashing."

That's hyperfocus. And that's and that's also um losing track of time. Or when we're at work in that context, going back to this is let's go back to the hunting example. I in the workplace often see people and they go on a hunt and they've got a hunch and it's that intuition and they don't give up till they find it. And sometimes that's really good because they're tenacious, but sometimes if they're hunches wrong that leads them in the wrong direction. So let's talk about cautions and how to enable people. So yeah, hyperfocus really good. Um let's think about this distractability. For example, if we are in an area where we have an open floor layout and there are six foot desks with

no partitions and I can hear every phone call that are the 10 people around me or God help them if that if the person has a voice like mine and they can hear every call that I'm on within 20 offices to be because there's no one in this room who has that experience with me specifically. Love you all. Love you. um that sensory overload. Um it takes as Megan talked about, it takes more attention and more energy for me to make maintain eye contact with you and to act appropriately in social settings. So think about this in terms of your work hours for a moment. If you're working 10 or 12 hours, a neurospicy person is

going to have to spend that much more emotional energy and cognitive load working on working with those other people. So that burnout can be even more challenging when say they're in an incident sarah scenario for a long period of time. Um with that said, let's talk about some tips to help these people. First of all, clear prioritization. One of the things I do when I'm working with people as a manager, yes, neurospice people can be managers too. um um is making sure my crew particularly those who I think are neurospicy or neurodeiverse have clear prioritization. So I'm making sure yeah that's a cool hunch or idea you have um that's your 20% role as they say in

Google and whereas we know what the 80% role is and we know what our priorities are. Um let's limit the distractions as we can. Now those are choices that each of us can make. Um, the perennial choice is like, hey, I'm going to put my phone on don't let me browse social media during the day because it's automatically doing that context switching and pulling me away using focus time in uh my communications app like team and zoom etc. Um, now I may need decompression. I may need to step back especially after a very difficult meeting and difficult conversations. As a neuro diverse person, the approach I need to take to delivering a hard message to one of my employees may tax

me twice or three times as much as someone who is neurotypical. So I may need to take a walk after that meeting like that was so terrible. Um and then finally buffer overflows. Let's talk about focus for a second. One of the most remarkable and interesting thing about people with ADHD is our minds are looking for those different things that are going to distract us. Except when we reach our limit, boom, it's what I call a buffer overflow. When I've got too many stimulants at once, if I've got, for example, if I'm in a meeting and there are two or three voices, I lose my edge. And this is this is a common thing. So,

for example, if I'm in a crowded restaurant, a very busy restaurant or a conference, I can't hear if there are many people talking, I can't hear anyone for example, or crowded bus, etc. And and it may hit you very quickly. That's what I call a buffer overflow. >> Yeah. I've been having some increased sensory issues recently. I haven't been to a conference in a while. Coming into here today, I was like sitting in the hallway. I was texting my I'm like, "There's so much noise and there's so many people." She's like, "Well, put your headphones on." I'm like, "I'm not going to be that weirdo walking around with headphones." Well, if you've seen me today, I've been walking around with

headphones. I put them in pass through mode to talk to you and then I turn them back on and walk out. I took them off for the talk because I wasn't going to take it that far. But I just get so overloaded. I I already told Carson today he invited me to dinner and I was like, "Okay, well, after this talk, I gotta like there's probably at least 30 minutes of you guys talking to me, which is fine. I love to socialize. I love to talk about this topic. And then I have to be like, okay, knowing it's going to be 30 minutes knowing I'm going to go out to dinner. Carson is a lovely

person, but it's still social. It's still socialization for me, which becomes a challenge is overflow. It's like, okay, I'm going to talk to all these lovely people who came to our talk and then I'm going to go to my hotel room and I'm gonna nap for an hour and I'll see you later, Carson. So, that comes back to that decompression time or I'll go on walks like Carson said after meetings. That's pretty common for me. So, that's just something you have to consider. If a person seems like they're disconnected at work, it could just mean that they need that decompression time. Now, moving on to something called p pattern recognition and systemization. Neurodeiverse people are very, very good

at this because of how we think differently from the neurotypical people. We can see anomalies and patterns in data. I love threat hunting. I can look at a mass amount of data and try and dig into these things of what's normal and what's not with systematic thinking and problem decomposition. Again, unlike a ner, we we may come to similar conclusions faster or we may come to a different conclusion versus a neurop typical person. Even speaking about neurotypical versus neurodeiverse, ignoring that, this is the same conversation as why would you hire people of different race or different gender and we say it's because people have different perspectives. They have different life experiences, different viewpoints, different ways of thinking.

And that makes a big deal when building a diverse team. And then people with autism typically encyclopedia knowledge. Um sometimes it can be on one topic. Sometimes it's broad, pretty good memory. Um so I I have a lot of things that I I get really excited about and I can talk to you all day about. And in the workplace that allows for pulling out information that maybe other people haven't learned or haven't thought about. We enjoy learning and retaining information. So within a sock, as I said, threat hunting, that's what I do. I very much enjoy it because I like looking for those patterns and seeing things that other people might not necessarily see. Um any investigations,

again, going in to look at those patterns, whether it's using reversing malware, forensics, or even purple teaming, seeing the two sides of things and looking at how those work together. So what that allows us to do, get from A to Z in milliseconds. probably the biggest thing in my life that has boosted my career is I can do things really fast. I don't necessarily and with a good outcome. So I may do something the same way as you uh and come to the same outcome, but I can probably do it a lot faster. Um I started college at 14, got my first degree at 18, another yeah 18, got another degree at 21, another degree at

23. I love learning. I love pursuing things and giving myself challenges. So that has been something that consistently in my career managers have said is you get stuff done. Um so yeah, as long as we're performing those fast, we just need control in place to be able to succeed in a way that allows us to succeed. >> So let's talk more about getting from A to Z. It is very much a feature and above and this is actually another friction point. Um, and I see it happen very often is I'll go from A to Z and people be like, "How'd you get there?" I'll be like, "It's obvious. Is it like it's right there? Don't you see it?" And

they'd be like, "What the hell are you talking about, Carson?" And and this is and I see this very frequently. So, one of the ways we want to look at that is, all right, get me from A to B to C to D. Show me your data. This is a big one. Show me your data. Show me your steps. And it's not and and that sometimes will get an emotional reaction. So you have to sit people down and say look I'm not doubting you. I just want to understand that's critical. Um so uh cautions we want to think about that rigidity and perfectionism knowing when when you hit that 80% mark that 70% mark when is good

enough. Um we have like Megan and I have done many presentations for example and we'll sit there um and when you can pet a presentation like they say in in painting there's a technique called petting where your painting has gotten to the point of good enough you can stop twiddling it stop twiddling the bits um literal interpretation of instructions understanding um you know what was the intent what did they actually say are you taking them literally no no this was where they were trying to go. Don't do that exactly. Think about what the intent was. Um, ambiguity or sudden change. For example, when we're traveling, if I'm traveling, I travel internationally, nationally, and internationally very frequently. And

I've done that enough that I have a rhythm and a routine around doing that. The first several times I did that solo for working and for speaking, it was very challenging for me because I was thrown off my rhythm. Um and then skipping steps again looking at that traceability. So what are our tips? It's show me your reasoning as I stated earlier. Um do your prototyping first. Show me good enough. I I often times see people they'll build these big elaborate projects. and they well I can't do that because the data isn't perfect or I can't do this hunt because I don't have all of the data or I can't build this really cool system because I only have

nine of the 10 data dependencies. Dude, hardcode the dependency and move on. Sprint ends tomorrow. My dude, you got to be able to know when to cut those those those lines. Cut, you know, make those shortcuts sometimes. So sometimes when we get stuck in those thinking traps, we become very invested in our idea. You see the A to Z. You become invested in that emotionally and you lose the objectivity to see the other options. This is a trap I see people who are narrow and diverse sometimes fall into. So you've got to pull them back out as a peer, as a mentor, as a manager. I just one story on the literal thinking unrelated to cyber security or my job.

And some of you are going to be like, "Wow, I never thought about that." And some of you are going to be like, "Are you dumb?" So, I saw this thing that was like a representation of literal thinking and autism. You know that joke, how did the chicken get cross the road and to get to the other side? It didn't mean the other side of the road like I always thought. So, think about that again. That is a literal statement that most people take literally apparently does not mean what it literally means. Okay, so context switching chaos tolerance. This is one of the hardest things for me. Um, so there's a reason it's not really as much of a strength in

ASD. It's really hard for me to context switch. It's really hard for me to tolerate chaos. If you tell me I'm going to be doing something on one day and then you say, "Never mind. Scratch that. We're doing something else." I really struggle with that. But in ADHD, those that is a big strength. It's something that people with ADHD are very good at. They enjoy multitasking. They enjoy the chaos of things. They're very decisive. They're very risk tolerant. I wish I had some more of these traits outweighing the autistic traits, which are completely opposite. My manager, multiple performance reviews, has said my biggest issue is I don't make a decision. He'll message me the most

random things about, hey, where should the new hire sit? Here or here? And I'm like, I well, I don't know. He's like, just make a decision, Megan. I was like, there. He's like, okay, well, I'm not putting her there, but I'm glad you made a decision finally. So, it's it's good to practice that skill set of making a decision. How this comes in in the sock, especially as incident response. Again, I'm not good at this. I have two degrees in incident response. I applied for a bunch of jobs out of college in incident response. And then there's a point where I realized I don't really want to do that because like I don't know what I'm

going to be doing daytoday. I'm going to be suddenly thrown into new projects. I might be sent somewhere if I'm contracting. Not interesting to me. But people with ADHD will thrive in those environments because there's always new things to do. The ability to triage things and quickly make decisions. Is this alert worth looking into more? Is it potentially a true positive or is it benign and we can move on? And then any dynamic operations. So the superpower for ADHD in the scope of context switching is that they will thrive in a multi-threaded world. It's a feature. It's something. But then we go to a buffer overflow. I'm sure you Carson have a story of of that. You you love

the buffer overflows. >> Well, I actually hate them. family members and the people who love me hate them even more than I hate them. Um, let's talk a little bit about this. This is interesting how this one manifests in how we interact with IR systems and computers. A lot of people will look at the tool overload that we have especially in sock and IR and be like, you've got like eight different windows on your computer open and you have all these tools like how do you juggle them? Like I don't see the problem here. Like what's your problem? What do you mean you can't keep eight different tools open and like bounce between them? It's

like I've got two incidents like I'll watch an analyst bounce between three different cases at once because any one tool is not loading fast enough to be constantly switching between three cases. It's phenomenal and people who are neurotypical they're like it's happening. Next slide. Um so let's talk about caution. So overwhelmed but this can reach a point. There's a there's a limit there right? Don't don't stir a copy. Make sure your buffer is bounded. Um being clear about when you're context switching. This is something interesting. Again, people who I work with frequently when we're we're multitasking. We've got multiple threads going on. Megan even and I were doing this at lunch. We were talking about

things and we were switching between three different and sometimes we have to say to each other, "Hey, alt tab. What what just happened?" Oh, I al tab. Can you can you stay with me? Come on. Um on the ASD side. Now, those sudden changes, as I said earlier, they can trigger anxiety. One of the interesting things I'd have to go find the the statistic, but there's a very high co- incidence of anxiety, which we're not talking about as much today, including anxiety and some of these other neurodeiverse traits, and it's wonderful. I mean, terrible putting them together. So, when you think about this multi-threaded nature is we have to be clear what the priorities are. Um, and I'm going to go

back. I'm going to steal a little bit out of the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. Many of you probably read it. Anybody read Grit? It's a pretty good one. Um, one of the most important things from that book, the author argues, is that you should keep one goal in mind and prune all branches that do not lead to that goal. So that level, if you think about that for a moment, that level of precision and focus can really help someone who's neurodeiverse prone all that other random stuff that's not actually a priority along the way. So we're setting discipline, which I know is hard, assigning guard rails. When are we interrupting someone? So my wife's favorite thing is when she'll

interrupt me like just just a goddamn minute, honey. She hates it when I do that because I'm focusing. I'm doing something right now and if she interrupts me, I'm going to forget what the hell I was doing. Um, so when we think about those different chaos heavy roles in sock, other areas of cyber security, let's think about how we're tuning that person's environment to the amount of multitasking and chaos for it. Yeah, my I also have a spouse who deals with me and similar uh to what Carson mentioned for he'll give me things that I need to do of like, oh, hey, do you mind un loading the dishwasher whenever and I'm like I throw off my blanket, get

off the couch, go. He's like, "No, no, no. You can do it like after your show." And I'm like, "No, I can't because you just told me to do it. So now I got to go do it otherwise I'll never do it." So I have the same issue. And just so you know what the conversation was at lunch because I think it's a great representation of ADHD is Carson came down to sit so we could review the slides quick, make sure everything was good. And then I was like, "Well, what do you want for dinner?" And he's like, "Do you like Thai food?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he was like, "First conference is going to be in Thailand

next year." I was like, "I'd love to go to Thailand because I used to train Muay Thai." And then and then he went, "Maybe we should look at the slides again." I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, that's what we came here for." This is ladies. >> Yes. And and to us there was a there was a clear thread like this all made sense. And to the neurotypical person, you're like, you had like five different conversations in 30 seconds. I'm like, no, no, there's a thread. I promise. So, moving on to communication, social interaction. As I said earlier in the talk, strength and weakness, very high honesty and direct. I think it's something that's missing in the workplace. Um, I this week I was I was

very annoyed with another team based on this product. I was very mad at them and I was like, "Hey manager, hey co-orker, I'm gonna stay out of that channel because I'm if I'm in that Slack channel, I'm going to say something and that something's going to make it to someone's manager and you're going to hear about it." So, I was like, "Let me let me just not talk in there." Um, when I'm sending big messages to large groups of people, especially those with executives, I always have my manager read it and say like, "Hey, how can I modify this?" Because I'm aware sometimes I'm a bit too blunt. And then with ADHD, there's a high level of deep

empathy. Now, I do want to mention with autism, I didn't show it here because it manifest very differently. There's a stereotype that autistic people are not empathetic. Uh, that's not actually the case. We are very empathetic. We just don't show empathy in a way that neurotypicals expect. It's very internalized. Those feelings are there. They're just not manifested in the way. So, they go, "Oh, well, you're not empathetic because, you know, you're not crying right now when I told you a sad story." Like, not the case. I may think the story is sad. I may identify with that, but I just am not showing it. I'm very very uh um very just not not able to represent those social cues. So, how

do these things come in handy with a team? Comes good with collaboration. Once people get past the fact that you're going to say what you're going to say and what you think, they actually begin to appreciate it. As I said, I was worried at IBM that my team, they would judge me for just like outright being like, "This idea is dumb. Why are we discussing it?" But then when they didn't have that, they realized that somebody needs to be that person and I volunteer to be that person. um engaging stakeholders, people with ADHD, that deep empathy, also the di directness. So when you get to a certain level in an organization, you're playing a lot of

politics. It's very refreshing not to play politics and hear someone just say what needs to be said. And then this allows getting to clear decisions by having those thoughts outright, having those direct conversations. So radical clarity, radical empathy, radical honesty. It actually isn't meant to be disrespectful. That directness is meant to help everybody get on the same page and understand what we're thinking as efficiently as possible. >> This is very much a case where uh you can see the feature and the bug all together. Right? So, for example, if I'm in an in the situation and I think you're being an idiot, I may tell you directly that's pretty stupid, right? And I know that you can't do that to

other people. You can't treat people that way and it's going to shut them down. So, there's a bunch of different techniques that we can use here. Um, thinking about pacing yourself back. Hey, I know I'm going to have to deliver a difficult message tomorrow. So, I'm going to step back, think about my relationship with that person, and pace out that message I need to deliver in advance. Generally, it goes better for me when I do that rather than having to think on my feet about how I deliver that difficult message. That much more important for someone who is neurodiverse on either side of that conversation. So, um how do we show empathy? Um, one of the ways I like to put it, some of

the people who know me very well, they're like, "This is Carson. He's an acquired taste." And that is true of many people I know who are neuro um diverse. You're you're welcome. Um, so social cues are a major problem for people with narrow neurodeiverse traits. Um, you may be pissed and you may be showing the signs of it and you think you're being crystal clear that you're pissed, but you're not saying it. and I might be like, I have no idea what's going on right now. Now, it's not binary, but it is sometimes a deficiency. Um, and that can be um and sorry, I'll I'll stop there. Um, so from this we get this kind of stigma of

misunderstanding, not being able to read those social cues, not being able to impart those social cues that neurotypical people come to expect. Um, so, uh, we need to be clear about our intent. we need to do so in a respectful manner. So, let's state our intent upfront. Let's take a moment. Let's establish safety with whoever we're engaging with. Um, we can use explicit emotional labeling. One of my favorite quotes from the book Nonviolent Communication, which was the first book that Satia handed out to his LT not long after he became CEO, stated in part that anger comes from unmet needs. Think about that for a moment. So when when I'm talking to somebody and I'm

pissed off or I'm pissed off at a situation, step back, ask, "What need is not being met right now?" Take a pause. That can help plan your recovery time as I stated earlier. And when you have those misunderstandings, again, remove the emotion if you can. Let's go back. We're all many of us here, we're all here in security. Show me the data. remove the emotion from the situation by um differentiating facts from opinion. I may have a very deeply established opinion about something that does not make it fact. And now yes, I'm once again quoting my wonderful wife. you made. >> Yeah, that as I said this week I I had a project I was excited about, got taken

away, put on another project that's been a mess. Responded with passive aggressive sarcasm the entire week, but end of the week today, I said, you know what? I was like, sorry, what happened? I was like, let's have a retrospective next week. Here's a document where I'm going to write down my thoughts and we can talk about solutions in the future. So, I try and step back and and view things differently when I get emotional and know that I'm being emotional with it. Um, I'm just not very good at like especially with annoyance. I show that a lot. Um, there's some emotions I definitely you can tell I'm uh expressing. There's a lot of emotions I

don't really express well. So, at jobs I have to be very clear about how I feel. All right. creativity and intuition. I believe this is our last one we'll talk about. Um, I don't feel like a very creative person. Again, that's my ASD overwhelming my ADHD. I would not say I'm a creative person, but I know so many people with ADHD and they're some of the most creative people I know. They don't h they have nonlinear thinking. So, they are able to think about things creatively versus thinking about things how they've been told to think about things and how neurotypicals think about things. And that leads to idea generation for things that may have not

have been ideiated without the thought. If you go back and look at a lot of the inventors in history, there's a lot of um belief that many of them were ADHD prior to the whole formality of diagnosis and that's where that creativity came from. And that creativity also leads to curiosity and exploration. I also feel that a lot. I really enjoy learning new things, getting deep into a topic. And where this comes in handy is the sock is you can do things about tool evaluation, thinking about, okay, well, what about this situation or that situation or this situation versus just like using it for a bit and being like, yeah, it will probably work. Really getting in depth

and trying to understand all the potential use cases and being able to develop tools themselves. think about the approaches that are possible, what is possible with certain technologies and expanding that. I do detection engineering on the side with threat hunting. Um I really enjoy thinking about okay, I'm trying to write a detection for this threat. How will it manifest? What are the ways said threat actor could get around it that we also need to consider detecting? How do I test this and make sure it works? So those are just a few roles in which there'd be a lot of thriving. So, our superpowers is that we can find sideways answers to straight line problems. When

somebody can't figure out a problem, the outofthe- box thinker is likely going to be the one to find the solution. It fuels breakthroughs, but we do sometimes get down the rabbit hole with that curiosity and exploration. So there's a balance here, but in general that creative thinking, that curiosity, that intuition is going to lead your team to find new solutions to problems within your environment. >> So let's talk about some of the approaches that we can take here. So this breath first search for those of you who took uh CS in university, right? Let's be very careful of the breadth first search. There's a lot of different techniques we can take towards this. Obviously, we talked about

prioritization. Also, there's one simple mechanic I use very frequently. If I'm in a meeting with someone who's neurodyiverse or just I ideating and we have a specific outcome. So, if I need you over here and you're like, "Random idea, random idea, random idea." Just dump it on just dump it to to text, put it down somewhere where you're going to be able to remember next time. Thank God for LLMs being able to find all that trash later. Right. >> What was I talking about yesterday? >> Oh, that meeting was recorded. Thank God. Um so being able to commit those lesser ideas, those off-topic ideas to paper, very helpful. Um yes, impulse control over committing. Oh, I can absolutely

have that done tomorrow. That's 20 hours of work. Yeah, it'll be done tomorrow. And then burning yourself out. So let's be thoughtful of that. Let's break those problems down and actually be thoughtful of what is it really going to take me to get from here to where I want to be. Um yes, executive functioning challenges. Um, there's many, many approaches here. Who hears a PM? Thank you. PMs are hugely, hugely helpful in keeping us freaking on track. My god, I've forced myself to be pretty good at ADO to keep myself and my team on track. Otherwise, we're all over the place. Let's do that idea of parking lot. Um, let's camp our commitments. be thoughtful about that 80% um solution

breaking projects and milestones. I love forcing people actually this is a real challenge for forcing us to think what is the absolute smallest increment I can do to make progress on a thing and forcing people like oh we can solve world hunger and I swear we'll do it by next week okay uh let's let's deliver some pies to someone in Milwaukee by Tuesday please and then be successful at that um so and then finally as I stated earlier when you're going from A to Z draw that out of them. How did you get there to validate those steps, show the data, and make sure we're in good shape? >> Yeah, I um do not have a PM on my team.

I complained about it pretty much every quarter during quarterly planning. And then we had the opportunity to maybe get a PM and my team was like, who thinks we need a PM? And pretty much everyone was like, nah, we do fine project planning on our own. I was like, okay, great. Outvoted. I was like, I would have loved a PM to tell me when I need to do what by when. >> Next slide. So, let's wrap up. So, why hire people who are neurodeiverse or we like to say neurosparkly? Um, we detect structure and chaos than others before they can even name it. I have seen so many incidents or hunts or pieces of malware or you name it that was

discovered by someone who had that diverse trait and can see something and make that connection and think outside the box in the way others couldn't. Um our we tend to have very strong creativity or ability to do repetition and we don't quit our job and we're constantly debugging reality. We're constantly looking at what's wrong, what's different, what doesn't make sense. Go ahead again. Um, so enabling us in summer, give us clarity work. Don't um don't give us guess work. If you have a goal or you want us to do something, please make that clear. Spell it out. Um, reduce the unnecessary load, especially in high STEM environments. It wears on us. Um, let us work things out the way

that we need to work it out. And sometimes that may be on our own times. Sometimes we need deep focus time. Sometimes we'll be working off hours. Please be direct with us. Please be honest with us. We will be honest with you. Um design for our strengths. There's going to be different people in these teams whose brains work different ways. We need to think about some of the different approaches we're going to provide to that team. Go ahead. Um here are some resources that we offer you. I recently read ADHD 2.0 I know was a nice refresher for me. Relatively quick read. Um Megan, do you want to say a few things about the book you

>> Yeah, so we were talking about our favorite books we wanted to share. Um I chose an employer's guide to managing professionals on the autism spectrum. Now you may say I'm not a manager um or I'm autistic. I learned so much more about myself and how I worked and how I can ask my managers to enable this reading this book than most books I've read about autism. So, don't look at it and be like, "Oh, it's for managers." It is for anyone who wants to understand how people with autism work and why they work. >> Um, I'll say one more thing about the reference I offered. Um, you know, I was originally diagnosed when I was a

teenager and we've learned a lot about ADHD in the last 30 years or so. Yeah. Um, so even if you're aware, even if you've been diagnosed and it's been a while, consider refreshing your mind because there's some aspects of this that we see or think about different than we did before. We also did some research and there are bajillions of neurodiversity um groups out there. There's three that we picked that seem the most reputable. So with that look again we're done. Please give us a 5.0 assuming it's on a five scale. I hope it is. Um thank you for your time and I think we have time for >> Yeah. >> We are giving this talk again at a

couple other conferences. So, this feedback form, if you have any feedback on what we could add, expand on, or get rid of, or whatever, please put it in that form. Um, yeah, Q&A, we can take a couple questions before we have to wrap up. Anyone got anything? Yeah, up front. Do you want to hand the mic >> so everyone can hear? Yep. >> Hi. Uh, thank you. First of all, that was a fantastic presentation. looking forward to all day. You guys definitely >> Thank you. >> Um I wanted to understand just as someone who has ADHD first of all and has been, you know, deal with that a lot the past year. As someone who feels like

I synthesize information best when I have enough and and therefore in the best uh opportunity to build those actual skills that get on a job. What's your advice for like conveying that to people that you don't believe challenge? Yeah, I mean I have the directness and the honesty. So I'm believe that just trying to explain how I think and how I work and what I want from people in order to work for me. Um, I've always said, you know, people like I know jobs are scarce and hard to come by, but I've always felt that if I try and especially with a manager say this is how I work and they say, "Well, too bad. That's not how I do things," then

that is not the environment for me. So, in with people in general, if they don't want to put in the effort to understand and to communicate with you, then it's probably someone who's not worth your time. To be honest, >> I'm going to expand on that. One of the reasons why I originally believed that it was important for us to do this talk and Megan's given talks on neurodiversity in the past is when I go to conferences and I'd ask rooms to raise their hands. Most of the hands would go up when I asked who here is neurodeiverse. I'm like this is not being addressed as an industry and particularly in cyber teams as you've

seen through our talk so many of the traits we have as neurodyiverse people are very important to being successful particularly in red team and IR etc. So, it's important that we um enable environments that enable these different traits. We have one time for one more question. >> We We got a couple more. We've got till 55 passed. I believe >> Megan's picking. >> Oh, I'm picking. Hand raises. Anyone back here? >> Okay, sounds good. >> How do you um how do you kind of define what 80% looks like or help someone else do that? I'll let you take that one, Carson. >> Sorry. The question was, "How do you define what 80% is?" This is a lovely

question and actually this is one of the areas where as a manager, I love engaging with my team and I love engaging with my team around this because I want to understand what they're trying to do in detail and how they're going to get there. And the reason this is so important is because it helps me show that deep empathy and how I appreciate what they're trying to do and how they're trying to get there and their technical craft and trying to do that. So then we say, "All right, what are you trying to do? What's your ideal? Let's a sellers should have mutual understanding and then have a frank conversation about what's the business outcome we're trying to get to

and how do we trim off all the stuff that's going to take a long time or is very risky." And that's where as a technical manager, I'm helping them shape and help them improve their decision making. And sometimes they've already got these ideas. In fact, some of several of my bosses who have had me reach uh read books on how to be a manager manager would admonish me and say you don't tell them how to do it. Give them the opportunity to say how are you going to reduce technical risk or schedule risk in this project. >> Thank that's a lovely question. Thank you. >> Any other questions back here? So it was actually a comment to what the

gentleman said earlier about how something that we have found works on our team is uh when we started working from home we just ask everybody and publish internally within our team what's the best way for someone to contact you email IM what time of day do you like working do you like adop conversations do you like to work asynchronously or do you want me to schedule like a one-on-one with you if I want to talk with you so just having those honest conversations where everybody on the team can see each other's answers we found works really well. >> Yep. Let me repeat the comment. Um so the comment was around it's very helpful in this gentleman's um team where they

would establish team communication norms in advance. Um one of the other terms I've used refer to this as team agreements. Whereas a team you have a deliberate convers and structured conversation around things like working hours and communication norms and how do you choose to interface with each other and that's huge and we may not be using the term neurodeiverse when we talk about that. It's absolutely behind it. You better believe there are psychologists who are on staff who are have been whose work has been read by the people in HR um building these programs on behalf of the workforce. Absolutely. Are we done? >> We can take one more if there's one more. No, I'll I'll throw into you Carson and

then I'll answer too. What stereotype is not a stereotype for you? >> What stereotype? Like I am actually >> like you identify it something where like if you ask the average person and told them you're ADHD, something they'd think of that actually matches versus >> like squirrel >> is true. >> Yeah, >> that is true. Yeah, I think mine um I I have about five pairs of the exact same shorts, three pairs of the same shoes, five pairs of the same jeans. Um and I wear basically the same thing every day. So, you know, I'm just like a modern-day Steve Jobs basically is what I'm saying. >> Also, Dino Nuggies, if you're autistic, you know why. I don't know why, but you

just know that Dino Nuggies are the bomb. I ate them for four meals this week, which is probably very unhealthy. >> We're eating tonight. >> We are. We're eating real food tonight, so it's fine. All right. Well, thank you again, everyone, for your time. I'll hang out outside the room for a bit. Feel free to say hi.