A few weeks into a new job, I tried to explain something to a colleague.

He'd asked about pricing tiers—how they work, when charges kick in. Standard stuff. I used an analogy about water and buckets. Structured it so the concept would click on first read. Edited it once for clarity before hitting send.

My lead flagged it as potentially AI-generated.

Not because it was wrong. (It was, partially—I'd conflated two tier models.) But before the accuracy issue even came up, the concern was: this seems like it was written by a machine.

It wasn't.

I'd just... thought about it and written it clearly.

I'm autistic. I don't always mention it—it's not the first thing I lead with in professional contexts. But it's relevant here because it explains something that might otherwise seem like a stylistic choice.

My brain prefers precision. It likes structured analogies, clean reasoning, edited prose. When I communicate, I tend to state conclusions directly rather than circling toward them. I don't naturally produce the hedges, softeners, and visible uncertainty that American professional culture treats as proof of humanity.

This used to confuse me. I'd write something clear and get a reaction that felt like suspicion. Not "you're wrong"—I can handle being wrong. More like "something about this doesn't seem right."

It took me a while to realize what was happening: I was failing a test I didn't know I was taking.

American professional communication has an implicit proof-of-humanity baked into it.

You're supposed to hedge. You're supposed to show visible effort, visible uncertainty, visible struggle. You're supposed to make your thinking look effortful—not in the sense that it took time, but in the sense that you want everyone to see the gears turning.

Clean reasoning reads as suspicious. Structured explanations trigger "did you use ChatGPT?" Confidence without performed doubt gets labeled arrogance.

The irony is that I work at an AI company. We spend enormous effort making synthetic voices sound natural and warm. And here I am, a human, being told my natural communication style sounds synthetic.

The machines are getting better at sounding like us. And apparently, some of us are getting flagged for sounding like them.

Yeah, bitch, I use em dashes—and I have for about a decade now. I spend time writing literary fiction and philosophy in my free time. It is and always will be a little classy. That's the point.

Here's what makes this more than a personal quirk: my autistic communication style maps almost perfectly onto communication norms in other cultures.

I've worked with engineers in Poland who would never dream of wrapping a correction in three layers of softening. "This is wrong, here's why" isn't rude to them. It's efficient. It's respectful—because it assumes you're an adult who can handle direct information without emotional scaffolding.

I've worked with colleagues in Germany, Israel, the Netherlands—places where professional directness isn't a character flaw. Where being wrong is treated as data, not moral failure. Where the response to a mistake is "okay, here's the correct information" rather than a fifteen-minute dance of face-saving.

And then I've watched those same people get labeled "abrasive" or "cold" in American contexts. Not because their content was wrong. Because their form didn't match expectations.

The first time I worked closely with a Polish colleague, I felt something click. Oh. This is how my brain already works. I wasn't being rude all those years. I was just speaking a different dialect.

The American professional class has developed a very specific communication style and mistaken it for universal politeness. It isn't. It's local. It's cultural. And it's increasingly expensive in a world where your team might span six countries and three generations.

I watched a meeting fall apart once because a senior American executive couldn't parse feedback from a junior European engineer. The engineer said, plainly: "This approach won't work. Here's why. Here's what I'd suggest instead."

Clear. Actionable. Respectful of everyone's time.

The executive heard: This person is being combative and doesn't understand their place.

The engineer heard, in the awkward silence that followed: Americans are fragile and I don't understand the rules.

Nothing got resolved. The actual technical problem—which had a real answer—got buried under a meta-conversation about "communication styles" and "cultural sensitivity." Two weeks later, they did what the engineer originally suggested.

This happens constantly. The cushioning that's supposed to smooth collaboration actively degrades it. People spend so much energy managing the meta-layer—the hedging, the softening, the strategic vagueness—that the actual content gets lost.

The generational layer makes this messier.

There's a Boomer-influenced professional norm that treats hedging as respect and directness as insubordination. You earn the right to speak plainly after decades of deference. Before that, you soften. You qualify. You make sure everyone knows you know your place.

But I've sat in rooms with senior leaders who hedged so aggressively that nobody knew what they actually thought. The meeting ends. Everyone leaves. Three different people have three different interpretations of what was decided. A week later, someone has to have the "clarifying conversation" that should have happened in the first place.

The younger workers who want transparency aren't being disrespectful. They're being efficient. They've watched the hedging culture produce meetings about meetings, decisions that never quite get made, accountability that dissolves into vagueness.

They're not wrong. They're early.

So here's what I've learned, mostly by getting it wrong in both directions.

If you're wired like me—direct, precise, made anxious by fluff even when it's coming out of your own mouth just trying to get by—the work isn't learning to hedge. It's learning to give people context. A quick "I'm going to be blunt here because I think it matters—it's not personal" costs nothing and saves the other person from hearing an attack that isn't there. Directness without warning can feel like an ambush to people who weren't raised on it.

If you're wired the other way—if hedging is your native tongue—the work is risking clarity. Say the thing. Not "I feel like maybe we should consider..." but "I think X." If you're wrong, you'll find out. And here's the part that took me years to understand from the other side: when someone drops the cushioning and tells you something straight, they're trusting you. They're treating you like someone who can handle information without being managed. That's respect, even when it doesn't feel like it.

The goal isn't meeting in the middle at some bland compromise. It's building cultures where both modes are legible—where the Polish engineer's directness and the American executive's caution can actually hear each other. Where telling your boss they're doing well isn't weird. Where naming what's broken isn't career suicide. Where asking for what you want is just... asking for what you want.

I'm not arguing for cruelty. I'm not arguing against warmth.

But clarity is kindness. Vagueness is not politeness—it's risk distribution. When everyone hedges, nobody knows what anyone thinks, decisions get made in the gaps between what people said and what they meant, and accountability dissolves into plausible deniability.

That's not collaboration. That's theater.

My autism isn't a limitation I'm working around. It's a communication style that happens to align with how a significant portion of the world already operates. The fact that it doesn't match American professional defaults isn't my problem to solve. It's a translation gap—and translation goes both ways.

I still use analogies when I explain things. I still edit for clarity. I still say what I mean in as few words as possible.

And here's my bet: the cultures that figure this out first—that treat directness as a feature, that stop penalizing clarity, that build teams where a Polish engineer and an American executive can actually hear each other—those are the ones that will move fastest and build best.

The rest will keep hedging their way toward decisions that never quite get made.

I know which one I'm choosing.