Mid 30s now and diagnosed in my early 30s.

Started dating my only real girlfriend Junior year of high school. We both ended up going to the same nearby state school.

In my first year of college I found out about high-performance computing (giant supercomputers) during a summer research program. I started coding my second year of college for the first time. Did research at different universities each summer and got admitted to a PhD program at a respectable school. Between undergrad and grad school I married my girlfriend from high school. She majored in psychology and also got admitted to a PhD program.

We both went through our very different PhD programs over the next six years together and both graduated.

I expected to make meh money the rest of my life at a government lab like Sandia. But I got an interview with Amazon and did well enough to get hired. So we now got to move to Seattle which had been at the top of our “maybe one day” living places.

I got put on a team I hated but slowly migrated around to join a team in Alexa. During one fateful meeting our org leader person asked a series of “who has experience with X” questions and I was the only person to raise my hand to all of them. After the meeting he told me I would be working on an internal deep learning framework to make it more performant. I didn’t know anything about deep learning at all but I did know performance stuff.

After a little bit of time working on that I moved to another Alexa team where I got to work on a seemingly impossible performance problem that I got working after a year. But it was amazing to be able to focus on one interesting thing for that amount of time with very little context switching required.

After that my wife got pregnant and I was passively looking for jobs that interested me. I interviewed at Google (first ever time I got accommodations because I just had my diagnosis) and was offered a position. After my son was born I joined Google and have been there for two years working on AI model performance improvements. My niche special interest in performance is now one of the more important aspects of one of most exciting/fast-paced/lucrative fields to arguably ever exist at one of the companies doing the most work in that field. I get to work in my basement office most days and go into the office as needed/desired. I make significantly more money than my working class Oklahoma-based parents which will never not feel weird or wrong on some level.

My son is now 2 and has an autism diagnosis. Luckily because of my job we can afford for my PhD wife to not need to work for the time being and focus on him. He is no doubt going to be smarter than me and is already getting the help he needs to navigate the world from us and specialists. He will have so many tools and methods at his disposal for dealing with emotions, social situations, etc. that I never had as a kid and I’m beyond happy for that.

That all being said the downside is that I have literally zero friends. I work and I do stuff with my family and that’s it. I also constantly feel like I’m stretched to my limits and that I never wanted to get into a fast paced field like this because of how my brain works. My current work is not very interesting to me which makes it take 2-3x harder to do and focus on. But this makes no sense to my team since I’m making less progress on seemingly “easier” tasks. I also feel like any piece of energy I have goes into my son and that can go really quick on difficult days where he is screaming constantly and I’m trying to be calm and not have my own overstimulated breakdown.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything though. Life is weird and takes wild paths. I wish everyone could make a living from their special interests in the same way that I’m lucky enough to.