This emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture — with its unwritten rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding work spaces — can be hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities around other people’s requirements.

Most Specialisterne consultants work in the offices of the companies that use their services, but some need to operate out of Specialisterne’s more forgiving work space. Even those capable of working on site sometimes get into trouble. In one case, the company was contacted by a medical-technology company, which needed help testing new prescription-tracking software. This seemed a marvelous bit of luck, says Rune Oblom, Specialisterne’s business manager, because there was a consultant on staff interested in illnesses. Everything was going fine until a medical team arrived to try out the software, and the consultant spent the entire morning recounting to them, in detail, the medical treatments that he, his mother and the rest of his family received over the years. Another consultant was assigned to finish the software-testing job. “I told him that the doctors were not very happy and felt he was a disturbing factor,” Oblom says. “But he couldn’t see it.”

The consultant has since been moved to another company, where he has done well at his professional tasks but still misses social cues. In Denmark, there is a tradition of bringing cake to the office on Fridays, and Oblom recently learned from the on-site supervisor that the consultant happily eats cake but has never volunteered to bring one himself. Then there was the time he tasted a co-worker’s cake and pronounced it terrible. Oblom told me that he plans to tell the consultant that he has to bring in cake now and then — and he will do it, Oblom predicts, without understanding the reason — but he’s not going to encourage the consultant to be more polite. The concept of socially mandated dishonesty would mystify him, Oblom said, so the other employees will just have to deal with it.

Specialisterne tries to anticipate, or at least mitigate, conflicts by assigning every consultant to a neurotypical coach. The coach checks in with the consultants regularly, monitoring their emotional well-being and helping them navigate the social landscape of the office. Henrik Thomsen, a jolly man who runs Specialisterne in Denmark while Sonne works on international expansion, told me about one consultant who is fascinated by train schedules. Severe storms can disrupt the trains around Copenhagen, and if the consultant’s train was delayed, he would start the day with a tour of his colleagues at the Specialisterne office, telling each how the commute played out, station by station. Sometimes another consultant would get annoyed and tell him to “cut the crap,” Thomsen says, “and then the real fun would begin.” So now Thomsen listens to the radio as he drives in, taking mental note of potential delays. When Thomsen arrives at work, he invites the consultant into his office first thing, listens to the day’s commuting story and then asks him to please get to work.

Specialisterne’s headquarters occupy part of a three-story complex in a Copenhagen suburb. Sonne showed me around the building: in addition to the consulting business, there is a nonprofit focused on spreading the Specialisterne business model, and a small school for people on the autism spectrum in their late teens and early 20s. In the largest room, boxes of Legos are stacked against one wall, and a pair of long, waist-high tables for Lego activities occupy the center, under a string of halogen lights.

When Sonne started the company, one of his biggest challenges was determining who would be able to thrive as a tech consultant in an office environment. A traditional interview was clearly not going to do the trick, and he had to think of other ways to identify marketable strengths in people who have difficulty communicating.

Lars had always enjoyed Legos, and talking to other parents, Sonne heard stories about how the toy bricks brought out remarkable, hidden abilities. “For many parents,” Sonne told me, “this was one of the few moments when they could be proud of their children.” So he decided to ask potential employees to follow the assembly directions included in the Lego Mindstorms kits and watch them build the robots.