BRAIN TRUST

Blake Adickman had gone through a run of unfulfilling IT jobs at small, no-name companies when, this past April, Microsoft invited him to travel from his home in Florida to Redmond, Washington, to interview for an engineering position. He’d heard about Microsoft’s grueling application process and imagined sitting through exhausting conversations and technical tests. Instead he found himself in a conference room, listening to classical music and working alongside 16 other candidates to build devices out of Legos. Over the course of two weeks, managers stopped by the room to chat. By the end, Adickman considered some of his competition to be friends. The whole process, he said, was “extremely relaxed.”

This was, in fact, the point. Adickman, 26 years old, is autistic, which affects his communication and thought processes; he has some trouble maintaining eye contact, for instance, and he