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Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?
I started a new job a month ago, and was hesitant to do so, because I'm yet to overcome certain patterns, that may be affected by a recent realization of having attention deficit. I'm a frontend developer, but feel little real intensity in the job, little stimulation, and haven't been that productive at picking up the codebase. This is also in an office for the first time in years, after being somewhat effective in a remote position. I'd also be interested about other people who struggled to tune their skills for productivity.
- epsteindidntk 7y agohave you heard of synthetic adderall from China?
- PragmaticPulp 7y agoFocus is a learned skill for everyone. A common myth among ADHD people is that deep focus and extended concentration come naturally to normal people. Truth is that spending 8 hours per day focused on deep work is not automatically easy for anyone. Everyone has to work on building that skill. ADHD people just need to work a little harder. Some tips: 1) Structure your environment to enable sustained attention. Be aggressive about turning off push notifications, unsubscribing from e-mail lists, leaving Slack channels that aren't relevant to your work, not accumulating a lot of browser tabs, and sitting somewhere out of reach of distractions. 2) Balance attention with activity breaks. Pomodoro timer apps are great for this. Start with 10 minute work intervals if you have to, but build discipline around respecting the timer. Stretch the work interval to 15 minutes once you've mastered 10. Then push to 20, 25, and 30 as you build up your focus. Treat it like going to the gym to get fit. Don't beat yourself up if you have to reduce your work intervals on tough weeks. 3) Be deliberate about time waster websites. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and HN are okay in moderation, but you have to realize that each time you check these websites impulsively, you're worsening your focus abilities. They can't be your automatic mental escape when focus feels difficult. In the fitness analogy, these are like junk food. Okay as an occasional snack, but they'll take a toll if they make up too much of your screen time. Set aside time before work, at lunch, and after work for checking up on social media. Block them on your work computer. 4) Physical exercise. It's cliche, but it works. It doesn't have to be difficult. Taking a 10 minute walk around the building 2 or 3 times a day does wonders for organizing your thoughts and getting away from screens for a while. 5) Find supportive ADHD resources, avoid reinforcing resources. It's easy to find "woe is me" ADHD communities on Reddit and social media where people vent about their ADHD problems. Venting and empathizing with others feels good, but it reinforces all of the wrong behaviors. You need to focus your energy on resources that help you improve. Good resources include working with a therapist (check your company's insurance, probably cheaper than you think) and spending time around people who have high organizational skills. 6) Be accountable to other people. With ADHD, it's tempting to hide your progress and blend into the background. Avoid that temptation. Send weekly updates to your manager about your progress, without fail. Knowing that you need to show your progress every Friday provides some healthy pressure to focus and perform. Going back to the fitness analogy, consider this like being accountable to a gym partner. Accountability is good for you. 7) Eat healthier. This doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. Buy a bag of baby carrots and snack on that at your desk. Drink water, eliminate soda. Minimize sugars. It feels cliche, but it really does help. 8) Build your identity around being a software developer. Don't accidentally build an identity around being an ADHD person. Don't let your issues define you. The diagnosis is only helpful as a way to help you improve yourself. Don't let it become a crutch or an excuse for underperformance.
- Ruxbin1986 7y agoAgreed entirely. ADHD is real and should be taken seriously. I've been tested positive by a non-quack in the 90s and again as an adult a few years ago. Building off of this especially the accountability section - when those with ADHD fail (and those with other mental disorders) - is often perceived by others as poor priorities, lack of maturity, etc. It's critical that it not be seen as such and those help the individual stay on task - through positive reinforcement, task management, organization, etc. - NOT shame.
- Ruxbin1986 7y agoOn another note, while I admit there are good ADD Resources - many of them are geared towards parents, teachers, kids, doctors. I find resources for adult significantly lacking. And therapy is an option however many US Health Insurance plans don't cover therapy. And my deductible is an amazing $5,000. Ugh.
- improv32 7y agoBesides the obvious answer of medication, which I've personally found very helpful, I think physical movement is the biggest thing for me for staying engaged. I just can't focus on things while sitting still which is obviously really rough as a programmer. I find that as soon as I have the urge to spin my wheels checking HN or tinkering with my emacs config or some other comfortable distraction I get up and take a walk, preferebly outside, in a way that makes my brain notice it's in a different space, then visualize myself working as I return to my desk.
- yabadabadoes 7y agoBased on being an occasional technical mentor to a friend with ADHD, I might suggest: I would experiment with plenty of exercise during the work week to try to find a mellow yet energetic state. I would look for ways to do something you find fascinating as a way to engage with the work. As an example, experiments with debuggers can give you a different way to engage with code. Don't be afraid to go back and forth between more and less code centric jobs. You may have a significant advantage context switching for presales engineering and roles that deal with more unexpected runtime problems, etc.
- afarrell 7y ago> You may have a significant advantage context switching for presales engineering and roles that deal with more unexpected runtime problems, etc. I would think the opposite: with lower working memory, context switching will be more painful and impose greater performance problems.
- m0ther 7y agoADHD (at least in my case) makes context switching, and switching back, easy (it's a core symptom, this is the reason we have difficulty focusing). It's rare to hear one of us say "now where was I?". I equate it to the threading model; instead of a single thread, we have a main thread, and x (let's say 5) additional threads running in the background. Our scheduler is peculiar. We can swap the main thread for a background thread easily, but we can't stop the background threads from running, and when unmedicated, they all fight to be the main thread, trying to tempt the scheduler into switching over. Hyperfocus occurs when the main thread panics, and the scheduler assigns all of the other threads to dump their workloads and help. You’ve spent your life adapting to keeping up with expectations using 1/6th of your processing power. Now all 6 cores are working on the same problem and you temporarily have a superpower. From what I understand (and this is an oversimplified layperson's understanding, so forgive me), we are unusually low on neurotransmitters and messages have a harder time making it across long distances without unusual effort. It is by default difficult to maintain hyperfocus. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and exercised; but once you get it down, you can maintain it while switching between completely unrelated tasks. Hyperfocus is triggered when tasks are mentally taxing. As long as everything I am working on is difficult, I can work on 5 tasks at a time (switching between them at interval) and complete them all quickly and effectively. Busywork is what stops me in my tracks; as soon as I don't have to think, I am dead in the water. How you handle maintaining hyperfocus depends on the situation; early in my career, when presented with a busywork task, I'd either automate it (ramping up the complexity), or take on a difficult stretch goal and switch between that and the busywork every x minutes so I can keep my brain awake. Now that I can pick and choose what I work on, I just take the hard stuff and nobody seems to have a problem with that. Fun fact: most of the "genius" movie tropes are just exaggerated ADHD symptoms and hyperfocus quirks.
- fredgrott 7y agoI have ADD: 1. Went for decades without knowing..not fun. 2. Structure, Structure, Structure will bring back huge focus spans to the point where you wake up from deep sleep and write code solutions...the first time it happens you will be shocked! 3. If not meds of if even meds make sure to re-adjust to more healthy diet...ie high tyrosine foods as tyrosine is what is the building block to dopamine which well lack . ANd actually lower doses of caffeine combined with high vitamin b works out better. Not sure why yet. 4. Exercise daily..no not 5 minutes a good healthy hour or so...I do sit-ups, small weights and jogging. 5. Be aware of your addictions and limit them Oh yeah, the benefits...would you believe it makes you a better UI designer as you know what structures to get a user to focus on doing something? At least for me it did and I even did a deep dive in cognitive science research because of it. Side note: Its genetic, my mom has it and my youngest sister has it as does my nephew
- adhddev 7y agoBackstory: I'm a senior engineer at one of the world's top 10 tech companies. I've had ADHD (and some kind of light Asperger's) my entire life, to the point where I couldn't concentrate on anything the first 12 years or so of my academic career _except_ for certain subjects that really interested me, like math. Some things that works well for _me_: 1) Good noise-cancelling headphones. I'm extremely sensitive to noise in the office. 2) Repetitive, monotone music. My productivity rises by 2-5x if I listen to hours and hours of repetitive techno sets. It's like I'm micro-dosing on LSD or something and the code is just flying out of my fingers. 3) Not getting disturbed when the headphones are on. Communicate with your team that headphones on = use Slack for communication, because you are in The Flow State 4) https://selfcontrolapp.com/ https://selfcontrolapp.com/ to help prevent procrastination 5) Martial Arts with sparring. Could be anything like MMA, BJJ, Muay Thai, kick boxing, boxing, wrestling, some types of Karate etc. Helped me a lot. Not only the obvious (getting ripped/in shape, confidence boost, positive effects on the brain from exercising) and blowing off some excess ADHD energy, but as an introverted nerd you learn how to keep stable eye contact and you stop being irrationally afraid of conflicts. It has made me much calmer as a person, and I don't have any burst of rage anymore. Cannot stress enough how much this has helped my career and at softening the symptoms of both ADHD and Asperger's. 6) Healthy sleeping patterns & diet. Without this, I can fall asleep in meetings (and have done it numerous times). 7) If you work at a company where you have the ability to skip meetings you deem are unnecessary - use it! The less bored you are, the more likely you are to be able to focus and not procrastinate, I think. 8) I like getting out of the office during lunch, just to get some air/sunlight/short change of environment. Feels like I'm less bored when I get back to my desk. 9) If I'm taking on a bit too big of a task, I try to break it down into subtasks because otherwise I get bored and start to procrastinate. I need very clearly defined units of work to work efficiently.
- Ruxbin1986 7y agoIs there a specific podcast, radio or band that you listen to?
- rajlego 7y agoI’ve found brain.fm works well for me though I also find earmuffs (I have the Peltor X5A) plus earbuds with very low wind noise to be extremely effective.
- intpx 7y agoNicotine, amphetamines, shear terror
- zamalek 7y agoI am diagnosed ADHD. I find that music keeps the distractible parts of my mind sufficiently busy for me to deeply concentrate on a single task. I am hopeless without headphones. I continuously twitch my one leg, a coping mechanism I picked up when I was very young. Finding a new job that stimulates you might help, or carving out a piece of freshness (invent/identify a problem and solve it) in your existing job - that will force you to learn the codebase as you improve it for your pet project.
- bfieidhbrjr 7y agoSlightly off topic but YSK that exercise, the elimination diet and QEEG neurofeedback are all statistically significant non pharmaceutical treatments. You can find it all in google scholar and pubmed. Also YSK that ADHD presentation is near identical to sleep apnea and mild autism spectrum. Even if you get a ADHD diagnosis remain skeptical and have the other two checked out with a sleep study and a autism specialist.
- bpanon 7y agoIs there anything that can be done to help autism?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rllyboredonline 7y agoRepetitive music, or listening to the same song over and over (it has to be a good one). Speed/Caffeine also seem to help.
- luxuryballs 7y agoI don’t recommend drugs because it really sucks after you build a career around it and then feel like you need to be on drugs just to keep your job but you can’t switch careers because you would take too much of a pay hit, you really feel trapped, especially if you have dependents, and you know that it is having a negative impact on your health, which is also not good if you have dependents because you want to live a long time. I know this is more of a warning of what NOT to do that’s not really answering your question but take it from me, once you are no longer a 20-something things catch up with you big time.
- heh 7y agoI have ADHD (diagnosed from childhood, retested multiple times since). I do DevOps/SRE type stuff. Used to do dev as work, and found it didn't work well with my condition. moved to sysadmin, and then DevOps/SRE type roles and it is much better for me. I have Ritalin, by prescription. It helps with the precision, boring, routine stuff. I do not take it when I need to grok a whole system in my head, or do creative problem solving. As others have recommended, repetitive music helps. The prodigy, Infected Mushroom, cowgirl, combichrist, etc are all on my work playlists. I found keto really helped a lot for me to get sustained focus, YMMV. If you do get flow, ride it.
- codingslave 7y agoJust take a bunch of stimulants and study leetcode, then go work at microsoft or google. They both have tons of easy boring work at a slow pace with good pay. Theres really no other option
- anoncake 7y ago> They both have tons of easy boring work at a slow pace. What the hell made you recommend this to someone with ADHD?
- codingslave 7y agoLow pressure, slow pace. If he exercises well, eats well, gets good sleep, etc he can manage to meet expectations in a slow well paying corporate coding job. With ADHD you want to put yourself in a job thats as hard as possible to get fired from, that still pays well. Some kind of startup that inspires "hyper focus" may work with ADHD in your 20s, but its a ticking time bomb, you will make mistakes. Not being detail oriented, people will come to mistrust you. With a family this is a risky career path
- m0ther 7y agoThis is an interesting perspective. I am in the complete opposite camp, but I will be thinking about this an questioning my position for the next few days. Thank you for sharing it.
- m0ther 7y agoGet a prescription for Ritalin. Headphones and Spotify. Volunteer for EVERY nightmare project to keep you engaged. Learn HTML5 canvas. Learn SVG. Learn to make components in whatever framework you're on and get really good at it. Get into webgl. Make yourself the special projects guy. Go deep where others won't. Hyperfocus is your super power; research it, figure out what puts you in hyperfocus, and what keeps you there. Listed above are some of the things that do it for me (that exist in the overlap between your job and mine).
- m0ther 7y agoI have to respectfully disagree with the user that suggested calming music (although it may be great advice for your case, it's terrible for mine). I also disagree with advice that you should not be medicated. Ritalin provides a 200% productivity bump for me, allowing me to decide what I want to focus on, instead of my natural "most interesting thing wins". The organizational and focus adaptations you made to survive before you were medicated become extra advantages once you are medicated and don't require them. I have a rule never to visit entertainment or social websites at work. Hackernews is the furthest I'll allow myself to stray in that direction. Entertainment sites will feed your distraction and we want that to starve. This is the list I am listening to currently: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7wwb18SxFVP9XYqxL09dDw?si=O1Vqcz_kTQaoFNi8fEuVIg https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7wwb18SxFVP9XYqxL09dDw?si=... I look for music that will keep my heart rate high and isn't created to evoke an emotional response. My aim is to be voracious in the office when it comes to completing tasks. I average 5 times the daily throughput of my coworkers. When I run out of new tasks, I set myself on building alternate versions of existing code to see if I can improve on core metrics or malleability until new work arrives. The best version goes to production. I never stop moving. I am a software architect and lead dev, I field on average 4 "gotcha" technical questions an hour, while working on the high risk tasks within the application. ADHD (if yours is like mine) provides you the ability to context switch with much less of an issue than others (even when medicated). It also allows you to more rapidly switch between a micro and macro perspective than others; although this is a skill you'll have to train in. Also train in communicating well. Err on the side of over-communication if you're going to work on tasks you weren't assigned when you run out of work; with practice, this will keep you from stepping on other's toes. I grew up playing multiplayer twitch arena FPS and FPSZ games (quake, tribes) and competitive fighting games (street fighter). Fast paced strategy, adaptation, execution precision, and rapid skill improvement are my comfort zone. You can approach professional programming the same way. You improve by doing; so do a lot and you'll improve rapidly. I wind down in the evenings reading documentation and decompiling/poring over the code of programmers I admire and researching why they did what they did. I have worked with a lot of programmers I can see ADHD symptoms in who try to mask them and fit in with the norm. They slow themselves down. I say you were born an outlier; make it work for you. Speed up until you're not distracted anymore. Push and refine what makes you special. Automate busywork (busywork is your worst enemy; but automating it is fun). Our industry is as ADHD friendly as it gets; your work time can be play time. Just make sure you never give a coworker an opportunity to say you are reckless (or God forbid, and opportunity to prove it).
- probinso 7y ago1. Find strategies to limit your field of vision like wearing a hat with a brim. Also limiting your feels of audio, noise isolating phones linked to white noise is a strong strategy. For White noise I use the YouTube live stream from the aloha cabled observatory 2. Allow yourself to work in different locations, don't get married to a single desk 3. Spend the last hour of every day wrapping up your work and documenting a personal list for tomorrow 4. Do not allow yourself to stay late just because a problem isn't solved. It's better to learn to wrap a project up, than solve it. ADHD can a habit of taking every evening from you when on a focus high 4. Pick up a course online that is relevant to work and follow it 5. I found my ability to focus significantly better with single technology tickets. I would encourage changing technologies and projects often, but the fewer technologies supporting any individual ticket the easier this has been on my brain. 6. Take a walk after every meal 7. You can find difficulty in different tasks. Becoming very good at ticket triage and documenting process is valuable and a lot of developers are bad at it. 8. Using a time tracker can be helpful, assuming it is low enough profile. I use hamster with its accompanying gnome plugin. Unfortunately I have never seen an offline solution as simple as this
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoI'll throw in a good pair of noise canceling headphones.
- afarrell 7y ago> like wearing a hat with a brim Your friendly neighbourhood marksmanship shop might be able to do you one better. https://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/ahg-Anschutz-Hat-325C-294.html https://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/ahg-Anschutz-Hat-325C-...
- lightgreen 7y agoI work from lunch to late hours (when these’s nobody in the office). Often work from the meeting room when it’s available, and sometimes work from home.
- stuntkite 7y agoSchedule is critical for me but I do the oposite of you as much as I can. Try to get showered, ready, and sitting in my chair by 5-6AM. Then I spend about 30 minutes writing in a bullet journal what I plan to do today, reviewing the previous days notes. I always start the page the same way with the date, time I'm sitting down, day of the week, and how I'm feeling. Then I open my IDE and get to it. I like the morning because no one is around ever. Slack is quiet, my phone likely wont ring. It's the highest probability that I'll get uninterrupted flow state. Then after lunch when people start asking questions I switch to a more social mode and it works. I tend to not be able to recover from moving into a social mode and going back to technical work.
- Antoninus 7y agoI’ve never been diagnosed but I had trouble focusing on anything that wasn’t sports or any activity that was highly stimulating. Your goal should be getting into a ‘flow’ state. Like many commenters before me, headphones, spotify and in a place without distractions. Start by reading a piece of code, go through it step by step until it makes sense. Keep doing this until you’re ready to work. Now you want to define a task, continue working until you lose your ‘flow’ state. Take a break, stand up and stretch. Now go back your work station and repeat that process. After 3 weeks of building this muscle you should see significant results. Best of luck.
- serpix 7y agoIf only there weren't interruptions all the time this would work. No problem getting into flow state but keep getting interrupted out of it.
- eithed 7y agoHeadphones + calm music Close mail + slack; open it at lunch break (ymmv depending on what kind of office you work at) Prepare a list of things you'll do and stick to it - oh, this change could benefit from this change and this one here. NO! Do what is required in the task. If you're going to clean the code up do it afterwards
- eanthy 7y agoEvery single developer I know has some degree of ADHD. I personally don't have it as bad but I know a colleague who literally can't shut up and stop moving and bothering us all the time. Honestly If the person is not aware of their condition I don't think you can do anything about it besides try to isolate and ignore them somehow.
- johnisgood 7y agoWhere is this place where they isolate and ignore coworkers? I would like to go there! When I was younger I always dreamed of a sysadmin-like job where I can do my own thing in the background without anyone bothering me! :D Now it seems like you need to be a social butterfly to become a software engineer or a sysadmin...
- itronitron 7y agolook for small to medium companies that do contract research and support work for the US DOD, lots of sys admin opportunities and lots of compartmentalization due to various rules and regulations
- johnisgood 7y agoI live in Eastern Europe. Could you give me any companies I could try? Ideally in Austria, English-only.
- itronitron 7y agoYou should look at Elastic's job postings, those are all remote and the devs I've met from there, while sociable, are not social butterflies. Also, Raiffeisen and several other banks have positions listed that may be what you are looking for. Most other companies that aren't startups will probably want German language skills.
- johnisgood 7y ago
- rajlego 7y agoA lot of people here have been talking about headphones/blocking out noise. To that end I HIGHLY suggest buying some good earmuffs (I use the X5A) and inside those using earbuds. It’ll look ridiculous (though there are smaller sizes) but for 30$ for earmuffs and 20$ earbuds you’ll have extremely effective noise cancelling if the earbuds are on low (the earmuffs don’t block well certain types of sounds but low noise from earbuds takes care of that).
- brailsafe 7y agoI've been meaning to do this all week. Do you have a specific pair in mind that works? I tend to prefer dead silence if I'm already energetic, because the adjacent noises of my coworkers slurping or coughing or chewing with their mouth open make angry. (yes misophonia)
- rajlego 7y agohttps://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Over-Earmuffs-X5A/dp/B00CPCHBCQ/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?keywords=3m+earmuffs&qid=1575692536&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sr=8-5 https://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Over-Earmuffs-X5A/dp/B00CPC... I use these exact ones and can attest to them working, keep in mind though that the size does really make them look funny. You can get smaller sizes but I’m not 100% sure how well earbuds will fit with them. If earbuds do fit main trade off would be that for silence you’d need somewhat higher wind noise but I’m sure they’re not too bad either.