Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
Part 15 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
Belief: Sarcasm is harmless — if people can’t take a joke, that’s their problem.
Reality: Sarcasm without trust is armor, not humor — and it signals fear more than confidence.
Action: Make your intent explicit before the joke, and own the impact when it misses.
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.
For most of my life, I thought of sarcasm as a personality trait rather than anything worth examining.
Then I was running an international data conference in Europe, setting up a room, and someone asked if they could take the chair I was holding. I said something like, “Sure, but we’ll have to fist fight for it.” We both laughed, and I handed them the chair. It was a quick, friendly moment, as far as I was concerned.
When I returned, I found out that a senior manager had filed a formal complaint with my manager. They described it as hostile and felt unsafe to be in the room with me.
I felt awful — that I had hurt someone. I then felt doubly awful because I genuinely hadn’t considered that my humor could land that way. My manager was clear: he understood there was no malice behind it, but I couldn’t control how other people interpreted what I said.
The intent was mine. The impact belonged to someone else.
I “had to be more careful”. Which, as someone with ADHD, I’ve heard so many times, it gets heavier every time I hear it (note to self, write about that in future newsletter)
That moment stayed with me. And it wasn’t until a few years ago— reading Brené Brown and thinking more carefully about my ADHD — that I understood what was underneath it.
The belief most people who use sarcasm carry is that the other person just needs to lighten up. That if they’d explained the joke, or if the listener had a better sense of humor, everything would have been fine.
I held this belief for a long time. And it let me off the hook in a way that wasn’t honest.
The truth is that sarcasm is rarely neutral. In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown describes sarcasm as a form of armor — a way of saying something true while maintaining enough distance to deny you meant it. If the joke lands, you get the laugh. If it doesn’t, you can say you were kidding. It protects you from the vulnerability of being direct.
For neurodivergent people, sarcasm carries an extra layer of risk. Someone on the spectrum may take the words at face value and miss the tone entirely, while someone with ADHD may be so focused on landing the joke that they don’t register the other person’s reaction until it’s too late. What feels like easy social currency in one direction can be a minefield in the other.
And underneath the habit of sarcasm, at least for me, was something I hadn’t wanted to look at: fear. Fear of being too earnest. Fear of being too much. Fear of not being liked. Fear that if I said the real thing directly, it wouldn’t be received well, so I wrapped it in a joke and gave myself an exit. That’s self-protection wearing humor’s clothes, not genuine connection.
The clearest framework I’ve found for understanding when sarcasm works and when it doesn’t is simple: trust.
Between two people who know each other well, sarcasm functions as shorthand — it signals intimacy and shared history. Without that trust, the same words create distance, signal that you’re not taking the other person seriously, or suggest you’re using humor to avoid something real. In a professional context, where relationships are still forming and power dynamics exist, sarcasm is far more likely to be misread than to land.
This is compounded for neurodivergent people in both directions. Michael put it clearly: when someone on the spectrum or with ADHD doesn’t understand a sarcastic remark, they’re not being oversensitive — they’re operating exactly as their brain was designed to. The joke didn’t fail because they couldn’t take it. The joke failed because the speaker assumed a shared language that wasn’t there.
Rupert made a point that reframed how I think about it: for many neurodivergent people, sarcasm is simply inefficient. It adds a decoding step that costs real cognitive energy — energy that could be spent on the actual conversation. When you make someone work that hard to understand what you meant, you’ve already lost the connection.
You don’t have to give up humor. The goal is to communicate your intent clearly enough that the other person doesn’t have to guess.
Use flash tags in async comms.
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s CTO, shared this on Lenny’s podcast — he uses intent labels at the top of his communications so the reader immediately knows what’s being asked of them.
Apply the same principle to humor: a quick “genuinely joking” or “not serious” after something that could be misread costs you nothing and protects the other person from having to decode your tone.
In Slack especially, this matters — tone is invisible in text, and people will fill the gap with their own interpretation.
Emojis don’t count as flash tags unless the meaning is unambiguous. A 😂 might signal a joke to you and read as passive-aggressive to someone else. Words are clearer.
Use the readback.
When you’re on the receiving end of something ambiguous, restate what you heard: “I want to make sure I understood you — was that a joke, or did you mean that?”
Asking for clarity is not a weakness — it’s the only way to understand each other without guessing. And it helps avoid disappointment of misunderstood intent.
Most people, when they hear their words reflected back, will confirm or correct without awkwardness — and once you’ve taught someone how you communicate, you rarely have to have the same conversation twice
Accept the impact, regardless of the intent.
When a joke lands badly — even when you meant no harm — the other person’s experience of it is real.
“I was just joking” is not an apology; “I understand why that landed the way it did, and I’m sorry” is.
The intent belongs to you. The impact belongs to them.
Sarcasm gave me a way to be funny without being vulnerable. For a long time, that felt like a reasonable trade.
Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead that clear is kind and unclear is unkind. I’ve been thinking about how much of my sarcasm was unkind — not in intent, but in impact — because I was protecting myself from the discomfort of being direct.
I’m still going to crack jokes and be sarcastic, but I have to be self-aware of the level of trust and power I might have with the other person.
That’s what I wish I’d known sooner — the joke was not the problem. The fear behind it was, and the risk of a missed connection was.
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