I am in a non-coding area of IT and see this attitude sometimes also. This despite deliberate efforts from management to squash such poor attitudes whenever they are seen. Newcomers who don’t take to the job like a duck to water experience backbiting and snappish comments from many of the more experienced colleagues, as well as attempts to get the newcomer sacked before they could reasonably have learned their trade. None of which is helpful to people who are perhaps in their first jobs ever, and almost invariably in the first job of their type (for complicated reasons, people with experience tend not to join my department).

I found the comment about the norms being established by people who were probably on the spectrum interesting. Yes, that is historically true. However, since the advent of social media, the tendency has been for neurotypical snappiness to predominate over autistic snappiness, with the result that my company has noticed people on the spectrum are significantly under-represented among new (last 10 years’) hires in IT. They’ve even launched a hiring campaign specifically targeting autistic people because they are otherwise often being excluded.

And how is my department trying to sort out the newcomer training issue? The last two newcomers who had issues with their original trainers for personality reasons have ended up finishing their training under me. I have autism, but apparently I have the necessary people skills. (That I also have a basic adult teaching certificate – an experience my colleagues don’t have – probably doesn’t hurt either). There are ways of making IT processes autism-friendly that help neurotypicals too. We need to find and use them.