I work for a company that places a high value on authenticity and the vast, vast majority are what you'd call "authentic" - sometimes eye-wateringly blunt, or at least very frank, and definitely their whole weird selves, whatever that looks like.

Perhaps it's zero coincidence that it has a very large proportion of employees who are openly neurodivergent.

I made the link the other day between ADHD (which is overrepresented among people in jobs like UX in the general population) and a strong dislike of office politics:

A neurodivergent person, particularly ADHD, sees the world in whole systems, which is quite hard for neurotypical people. That carries a lot of emotional labour - thinking for, and empathising with other people to explain things to them that they cannot readily understand.

A reason neurodivergent people find those types of jobs easy is because they have learned, from infancy, to "read the room" to avoid social exclusion, as well as being generally better at noticing things. (An autistic person, for example, processes up to twice as much visual information as a neurotypical person.)

So you have the cognitive load of processing additional information, the cognitive load of trying to be acceptable to others and avoid exclusion, and the cognitive load of trying to explain things to other people.

So if Barry from Sales wants to play at office politics, he can fuck right off.