I believe they were implying they don’t get social cues due to neurodivergence, likely autism. Hilariously you’re also not picking up on their social cues and implications, which is likewise telling.
Not reading such motives is not a sign of neurodivergence. If people are jumping to these types of conclusions, it's their deficiency. Plenty of normal, non-neurodivergent people refuse to read much into these things.
I've read a number of books on effective communications, and they all emphasize not to read into these signals, and when you do, to go and have a conversation about it to confirm them. I found, as many have, that the error rate is about 50% (i.e. half the time you read the signals wrong).
These books are for normal people - not neurodivergent folks.
It’s perhaps even more maddening than that. Even if all these factors are at play, it doesn’t mean they actually matter all that much to anyone involved. These two coworkers might otherwise really get along and respect each other, but this is one of the games that they are playing with each other.
On the surface, implicitly negotiating over who is more important sounds horribly dramatic, but it’s a game that’s happening constantly among everyone. Usually folks push and pull over some equilibrium point, one person making concessions, then the other, in turns, with the actual hierarchy determining roughly how many turns each person should concede before making a demand of the other. This is where you get dynamics like “he’s a very demanding boss but he cares a lot about his employees” (high amplitude of switching between demand and concession) or “she’s very sharp but also hard to get along with” (doesn’t concede enough to make others feel important).
Concession in this game can be anything, small to large, from being the one who opens the door to let the other through, to offering help during personal problems, to letting someone take more credit on a collaboration.
But, again, these are all played in the implicit layer. They can be raised to the explicit layer by having a “heart to heart”, like “you’re always so kind. I appreciated when you did XYZ”, or “I’d really like if sometimes you did ABC”.
Here's some advice: There will be literally never, ever, be a situation in your life when it is okay or even remotely appropriate to tell somebody else that "they're autistic".
If you figure that someone is autistic just make the accommodation you notice they need, because if you don't you are in fact the one being demanding of them to do the work to make the social thing happen on account of two people.
