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ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have dev

by alfor 4y ago

ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity.

donatj 4y ago
This sounds a lot like me. I do get a TON done, am always working hard, but I can’t single thread to save my soul. I have a tendency to work on 6+ tickets at the same time which has in the past clashed with what management has wanted - clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board. For instance I have a project right now that in linear time has taken about a week but has taken well over a month in actuality because I am constantly jumping around. I literally don’t even mean to, I try to stay on task but will get an idea for a difference project and switch branches without even thinking about it. I don’t know that I would want to medicate it, I don’t have a problem with it and my net output is very good even if individual tasks take longer than “they should”. I see it as just an alternate way of thinking/working. I just wish we’d stop trying to jam people into workflows. You’re missing out on potential.
- darkerside 4y ago
  The danger is that multitasking like that can make you FEEL like you're getting a ton of things done while you're really just spinning wheels in place. I'm not saying that's what is happening to you. You may have data to back up what you're saying. But there could be a parallel in some cases to moneyball, which exposed how intuition and bias had led to suboptimal decisions through false perceptions.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  The problem with a lot of stuff in flight and nothing shipped is it’s extremely expensive. You’re basically holding onto inventory that isn’t able to be sold. It isn’t people jamming workflows, it’s economics.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Agreed. Sometimes I have multiple outstanding pull requests against the same code for features different enough to be different tasks. It rarely works out well but for whatever reason I don't notice it happening until the end. Alternatives are: overloading pull requests with multiple distinct tasks (bad), sitting on my hands (bad), updating the code for each PR as others are merged (bad, error prone), or creating pull requests that merge into other branches pending review (less bad but annoying to maintain). I tend to do the latter.
- tbrake 4y ago
  If you're a small enough team, this doesn't matter. But if someone else - whether a single dev or another team - depends on your work then you run the real risk of being a bottleneck to other people and the business. At that point all the "potential" in the world means jack if we wanted to ship in June but pushed back to August.
- scruple 4y ago
  I often have multiple tickets in-flight but it's because some pieces are blocked and/or I'm waiting on a gate to open or I have some scheduling situation I'm dealing with. Today and tomorrow I'm working on a long running (started 2 weeks ago, will run for the coming months if not the remainder of this year) legacy system modernization project. On Monday, I have maintenance work I'm scheduling that is either going to take an hour or 2 days and I won't know til I press the proverbial button. These two are on top of all of the unplanned work that comes up, some of which I'm seeing this morning before I technically start work. For the unplanned work, I'll have to double back and make tickets to capture what was done at the end of the day, but right now that looks like 3 separate pieces of work today. So, I think its safe to say that I'll be grappling with 4 tickets today, with a fifth in the back of my mind, and making sure the product team is on top of communication around the internal outage the team will have on Monday. I also have to get my kids to daycare/preschool, get myself to physical therapy, and then pick the kids up. I feel like I probably do have undiagnosed ADHD but maybe I'm always so busy moving from task to task that it doesn't have a lot of opportunity to allow, for want of a better word, procrastination to really set in?
  - gavinmckenzie 4y ago
    A need to multi-task is 100% ADHD. Our (inattentive) ADHD brains are like a car engine that will stall if it's allowed to idle, and so we have to keep the revs up in order for it to keep running. For us inattentive ADHD people, the meds have the effect of raising our engine's idle speed so we don't have to keep our foot on the pedal through multi-tasking just to stay engaged. It's easy to rationalize this behaviour, and it can feel amazing when you're on top of everything, but it can take a toll and end up in burn-out or disaster when all those (to mix metaphors) plates you've kept spinning eventually fall.
    - alfor 4y ago
      I like this explanation. Lot’s of multitasking, over consumptions of information and procrastination on my side. With med it’s like I am more calm and energized at the same time. Made me see how most people see the world for the first time.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Missed Potential is the name of the band featuring everyone with ADHD who was called "smart but unmotivated" by their teachers, never got tested, and never derived the benefits of treatment. You're free to do whatever you want, but if someone in a wheelchair refused a simple surgery that would fix their problem, and said that people trying to help them walk were "jamming them into workflows", you'd really think that maybe the person in the wheelchair should get looked at.
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    As someone who was diagnosed in my 30s, used medication for about eight years, then got off of it for about three years, I'm going to offer another viewpoint. I am grateful for the clarity I got with the meds, but something always felt off and I definitely talked too much. I finally decided to get back off meds, and my anxiety really subsided. By that time, I had built a pretty effective external structure of calendar, reminders, etc. to handle the ADHD aspects of my brain, but without the anxiety to also deal with (which ramped up my ADHD exponentially), the ADHD is totally manageable and I don't feel so out of sorts and, for lack of a better term, "domesticated" into being what corporate America thinks they want. I get along just fine, and I attribute a lot of that to finding a job I enjoy and having a boss who is patient with my unpredictable, but important contributions.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      Anxiety is really the crux of it. My psych prescribing anti-anxiety meds was life changing!
    - zamnos 4y ago
      If you've been on medication, and know the effects of it on you well, and you're able to put systems in place to overcome the shortcomings this legally recognized disability has afflicted you with (as well as the blessings), then absolutely be off medication as you please. Tis your life to live! But for those that haven't been on medication for extended periods, or even just tried medication at all, for whatever reason, be it fear pushed by anti-medication zealots, or an inability to access it; for those that are tired of their life failing for reasons that everybody else seems to just be able to do, medication is, sometimes literally, a lifesaver.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  >> clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board It's pretty unfair to characterize the demand as a desire to look nice, when in your next sentence you admit that a week task has taken you more than a month. I don't give a shit about the kanban board but I do care about work in progress. There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done. What you consider multi-threading is micro time slicing, with significant context switching costs. The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile, while me, an old fart in management, see a giant pile of have half-finished widgets collecting dust. Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work you'll never be successful with the newer approaches of continual delivery, and constant, small-scale, non-scary releases.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    > when in your next sentence you admit that a week task has taken you more than a month The word 'admit' suggests you had to drag it out of him, that he's hiding slow progress behind a smoke screen of busy work like opening many tickets. That month-long background task wouldn't have had any work done otherwise so it's unfair to call it delayed. > Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work That's the problem with people who think they're technical managing the actual workers, they always end up micromanaging and slicing things into shapes that don't fit. The world isn't single threaded and changes usually aren't entirely unrelated. You should change your management style to simply specifying the business goals you want and asking for as many to be completed as possible. Let your team do what works best. > The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile No, because all those labels just encourage people to pick a style and do that thing regardless of circumstances. In a real project I've got to coordinate everything with someone. I can't push code without a review, I can't code to a team's API without sending them the spec for review, etc. During these times I could facebook like some others do, but instead I "multi-task" by doing other work. Also, it's not very obvious from simple metrics like number of lines of code committed which work is hard and which is simple fluff which can be fixed without a distraction. A change to a logger might percolate through every method call and appear big and complex despite having been made in seconds by the IDE. If I was implementing a new feature I'd probably want to update the logging style first rather than coding to the old standard, so I'd make the big change (probably covered by another ticket) because I'm already in there and have to test that stuff anyways. > There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done. As I said, there are a lot of down periods in that process. It feels like you think you know some deep secret ("only delivered features count!") that you think you can't get people to acknowledge. This is actually like day-one stuff in engineering school, that you need to measure benefit of your work in delivered advantages so done isn't done until it's in use. But there's a lot of other stuff as well, such as not delivering something until it's safe to use even if it works in test scenarios. You should have a discussion with your team about your idea and brainstorm where it fits into a full product development cycle and what has to be considered. I imagine you will find they don't discount it, but they have a wider view of the process than your business focused one, and that they have to balance all of this while also managing your perceptions.
CM30 4y ago
> When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. I think you basically summarised my own issues with work in the past, and why I seem to burn out so quickly. Wouldn't be surprised if I had ADHD tendencies as well as being on the autistic spectrum, and that explained why I get so sidetracked with different hobbies and jobs and activites rather than being able to stick with one or the other.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah I spent a long time with different people telling me I had adhd, or maybe autism. Or autism, but maybe adhd, they are similar in some ways after all. It turns out it's both, which is its own exciting thing and in some ways a very surprising or unintuitive combination of what you would expect. And also surprisingly, specialists for both struggled to identify it correctly. I'm not sure if I just got unlucky there or what. But yeah you might want to consider and look into what experiences are like for people who do have both, because it's not what I would have expected before I knew this about myself.
stavros 4y ago
I've been there, and it's hell. You waste your day staring at a screen, trying to get yourself to do something, but you can't, so in the end you both get absolutely nothing done and you waste all your time on it. It would almost have been better if I just said "fuck it" and didn't work at all. I'd have exactly the same output, but at least I'd have my free time back. If you're in this position, I recommend you work with your manager to find work you enjoy, or work with your peers to work on stuff together. It's always been helpful when I was talking to a colleague about doing small chunks of work at a time. It wasn't even that they were checking up on me, we'd just say "ok I'm going to work on adding this task to CI" "I'll work on this API", and then we synced back an hour later, and that seemed to help me focus.
- zamnos 4y ago
  If you're that executively dysfunctional to the point where it's affecting your career, then it's time to escalate the problem beyond what your immediate manager can provide (but do talk to them about this), and find a mental health professional that can help. everybody has their off days but if those days turn into months and then days and then years, it might be burnout, at which point you'll still want a mental health professional to help guide you through the troubles but it could be something else. like ADHD.
  - stavros 4y ago
    In my case, I got a job I really enjoy doing, and I'm extremely productive at it, but I agree in general.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      That's great! Yeah I got a job in the incident response part of the industry because it turns out my brain will work if it thinks it's an emergency, and I'd like to think I've done quite well for myself.
rtpg 4y ago
There are definitely people who have ADHD and are simply not diagnosed, as well as people who are "afraid of" medication for reason X. For people who are unsure about this, though, ADHD having-ness is not 100% equivalent to "being unable to do your job with focus". Like parent mentions, ADHD is fundamentally about low executive control. So if you find yourself often saying things and immediately regretting it (often mid-phrase), having trouble with addictive behavior, and otherwise just doing things and regretting them in social spheres (as you "know better" in theory), then it could fall in there. The social issues that come up with ADHD are an under-rated aspect of the disorder, and rules out a lot of the "it's not ADHD it's capitalism" stuff. If you just can't concentrate at work... might be something else. Handling ADHD with meds can make your life better, but at the end of the day your job might just not work for you.
- acdha 4y ago
  Yeah, I periodically think about the stigma ADHD had when I was a kid in the late-80/90s and wonder how many people have some degree of impact on their life but have resisted a formal diagnosis and treatment. Some people used to talk about medication like it was a lobotomy.
  - steveklabnik 4y ago
    This was me. Unironically, my first few times actually finally trying medication not helping me very much is what made me get over the stigma. When it simply... didn't help much, rather than making me a pill-addicted raving addict, something clicked.
    - acdha 4y ago
      We’ve definitely talked about the cruel irony that my dad never got treatment for depression but tried basically every illegal thing he could get his hands on trying to self-medicate. The line in his mind between medicine and party drug was tragic.
- danaris 4y ago
  ADHD also isn't just one thing: it's a constellation of symptoms with similar causes, and two people can "have ADHD" and have very different subsets of those symptoms.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Whether this is the case quickly becomes apparent by working closely in tandem with the person, e.g. pair programming. It will be obvious within the first few minutes whether the person simply cannot hold a train of thought for as long as the problem requires. As you write, there are concrete ways of addressing this. On the other hand, it is also obvious when the lack of productivity stems not from a lack of focus but simply not having a mind suited to the job. I’ve seen people focus intently for hours to complete a task that would take most others on the team a few minutes, and not for lack of knowledge or training; their brain simply worked at a much slower speed. There is nothing that can be done to rectify this. These are thus the hardest people to empathetically fire, since you’re basically letting them go for not being smart enough for the job, despite being an extremely diligent worker.
- TexanFeller 4y ago
  Pairing is actually one of my most helpful strategies for keeping myself on task with boring tasks. People probably notice my ADHD much less when pairing with me. One reason remote work has destroyed my productivity is that pairing just can't happen in the same way.
  - rdubz 4y ago
    interesting, I've had a much easier time pairing (and felt benefits like you describe) over Zoom. Pairing by actually having 2 people at a desk never felt very comfortable, but screen-sharing with each person on their own monitor etc. works great, IME. I'm curious what you've tried / why it hasn't worked...
    - trilobyte 4y ago
      Back in the day, about 15 years ago now, when I was pair-programming every day and trying to teach new people how to do it, everyone was awkward at first. People who were Vim experts suddenly started stumbling over basic tasks. All of them who persisted eventually got over the awkwardness. Not all of them enjoyed the pair programming, but the ones who I talked to later found that it wasn't as awkward after a bit.
davidktr 4y ago
Oh god, this is so much me. I seem physically incapable of executing any task beyond 80%. Otherwise I work very quick and thorough, so it takes a long time for others to catch on. Medication helps a lot, but not in that regard. No matter what, I cannot explain this issue to anyone, not even therapists. It's sad to think I'll never progress beyond what I currently do because of this.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Have you tried different medication? Your psychiatrist may be able to help with that missing 20%.
- operatingthetan 4y ago
  >I seem physically incapable of executing any task beyond 80%. I think this is what happens to me. I have a bunch of home improvement projects that I started, did 80%ish of, then stopped and started another one. It's not a problem at work because I graduated to manager at some point.
devinprater 4y ago
Oh wow, maybe that my problem then.
tr3ntg 4y ago
I hear this all the time, and these workplace-focused descriptions of "phases of underperformance" really apply to me, but I don't think it's ADHD. I can focus on all sorts of things when I try, and when I look up symptoms of ADHD, maybe just 5% apply to me. For me, I've joined new teams and crushed it for a few weeks where it was at least expected performance, but then I quickly fall off a cliff for seemingly no reason. Anxiety compounds this, and I can identify why I've sometimes been slow to crawl out, but the initial fall is always difficult to diagnose.
- gavinmckenzie 4y ago
  I was diagnosed ADD (or what would now be called inattentive ADHD) in my 30s. But the testing results were not clear, in part because I'd developed a lifetime of coping mechanisms and skills that allow me to behave in non-ADHD ways through force of will. If I look back at my primary school report cards, they are a mixture of both gifted and below-average performance with teacher comments like "Does amazing work when he applies himself". That sudden lack of motivation or drop in performance on tasks that we previously excelled at is also classic ADHD. Anxiety is often a comorbidity, stemming from a feeling of inconsistent failure and lack of control. Though my understanding is that anxiety may be more present in women sufferers of ADHD where the disease manifests differently than in men. All of this to say that you may feel like a DSM definition of ADHD doesn't map onto your experience, but that may be because you're an adult who has a lifetime of adaptation.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    I'll be 60 in a few months and looking back I've tended to think that anxiety has been the main thing that held me back in my career, but I can also relate to the post above where they say they do great in the early days of a job/project, but as time goes on find it more and more difficult to stay engaged. I guess I would think this is caused by anxiety in my case, but now I'm wondering if maybe there isn't more going on. I also got mixed results in school: gifted in subjects I liked, average/below averages performance in subjects I didn't care much about. So maybe there's always been a bit of an issue, but I also tend to think that it's much worse since the advent of smart phones - I think there may be a lot of us who were either not ADHD or just on the edge of being ADHD that have been pushed over the edge by being constantly connected.
schneems 4y ago
> Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity. This list is good. Also there are communities to learn from and therapy is really important. A provider said to me “therapy without medication is okay, I wouldn’t do medication without therapy”. Also it’s important to remember that people with ADHD excel in areas that neuro-average people do not. In an ideal team people work together to accentuate each other’s strengths and build systems that work for everyone.
7speter 4y ago
Heh, its been fun finding out that I have adhd, then finding out I have sleep apnea. Before I was just lazy.
Fr0styMatt88 4y ago
This is so timely. I’ve recently had a performance review and distractibility and ending sprints with multiple, unfinished tasks is a huge problem that got flagged and that I need to work on. The frustrating thing is I’ve done multiple ADHD self-tests and quizzes (like the ASRS) and Asperger tests (like the Aspie Quiz) and I’m always just on the border or right in the middle for both (eg- two grey boxes on the top of the ASRS instead of three IIRC and almost equal parts Aspie and equal parts normal on the Aspie Quiz). Even still I can relate to this. I know people with really severe ADHD that affects all aspects of their lives and I don’t think I fit that category, but at the same time I have to look at the external indicators (current job performance, being told by multiple people I’m likely ‘on the spectrum’, etc) and they make me unsure of my own judgement of myself. This is more complicated by the fact I was blind for some time after I was born and people in that situation often have autistic traits (‘blindisms’) so it’s really hard to know what traits come from where.
- anotheruser13 4y ago
  You might want to see a neuropsychologist and go through a formal testing process. I've had inattentive ADD all my life, but was not diagnosed until I was in my 40s. I often wonder how my life would be different if I'd been diagnosed and treated earlier in life. Fortunately I don't worry about that.

by alfor 4y ago

donatj 4y ago

This sounds a lot like me. I do get a TON done, am always working hard, but I can’t single thread to save my soul. I have a tendency to work on 6+ tickets at the same time which has in the past clashed with what management has wanted - clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board. For instance I have a project right now that in linear time has taken about a week but has taken well over a month in actuality because I am constantly jumping around. I literally don’t even mean to, I try to stay on task but will get an idea for a difference project and switch branches without even thinking about it. I don’t know that I would want to medicate it, I don’t have a problem with it and my net output is very good even if individual tasks take longer than “they should”. I see it as just an alternate way of thinking/working. I just wish we’d stop trying to jam people into workflows. You’re missing out on potential.

darkerside 4y ago
The danger is that multitasking like that can make you FEEL like you're getting a ton of things done while you're really just spinning wheels in place. I'm not saying that's what is happening to you. You may have data to back up what you're saying. But there could be a parallel in some cases to moneyball, which exposed how intuition and bias had led to suboptimal decisions through false perceptions.
flappyeagle 4y ago
The problem with a lot of stuff in flight and nothing shipped is it’s extremely expensive. You’re basically holding onto inventory that isn’t able to be sold. It isn’t people jamming workflows, it’s economics.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Agreed. Sometimes I have multiple outstanding pull requests against the same code for features different enough to be different tasks. It rarely works out well but for whatever reason I don't notice it happening until the end. Alternatives are: overloading pull requests with multiple distinct tasks (bad), sitting on my hands (bad), updating the code for each PR as others are merged (bad, error prone), or creating pull requests that merge into other branches pending review (less bad but annoying to maintain). I tend to do the latter.
tbrake 4y ago
If you're a small enough team, this doesn't matter. But if someone else - whether a single dev or another team - depends on your work then you run the real risk of being a bottleneck to other people and the business. At that point all the "potential" in the world means jack if we wanted to ship in June but pushed back to August.
scruple 4y ago
I often have multiple tickets in-flight but it's because some pieces are blocked and/or I'm waiting on a gate to open or I have some scheduling situation I'm dealing with. Today and tomorrow I'm working on a long running (started 2 weeks ago, will run for the coming months if not the remainder of this year) legacy system modernization project. On Monday, I have maintenance work I'm scheduling that is either going to take an hour or 2 days and I won't know til I press the proverbial button. These two are on top of all of the unplanned work that comes up, some of which I'm seeing this morning before I technically start work. For the unplanned work, I'll have to double back and make tickets to capture what was done at the end of the day, but right now that looks like 3 separate pieces of work today. So, I think its safe to say that I'll be grappling with 4 tickets today, with a fifth in the back of my mind, and making sure the product team is on top of communication around the internal outage the team will have on Monday. I also have to get my kids to daycare/preschool, get myself to physical therapy, and then pick the kids up. I feel like I probably do have undiagnosed ADHD but maybe I'm always so busy moving from task to task that it doesn't have a lot of opportunity to allow, for want of a better word, procrastination to really set in?
- gavinmckenzie 4y ago
  A need to multi-task is 100% ADHD. Our (inattentive) ADHD brains are like a car engine that will stall if it's allowed to idle, and so we have to keep the revs up in order for it to keep running. For us inattentive ADHD people, the meds have the effect of raising our engine's idle speed so we don't have to keep our foot on the pedal through multi-tasking just to stay engaged. It's easy to rationalize this behaviour, and it can feel amazing when you're on top of everything, but it can take a toll and end up in burn-out or disaster when all those (to mix metaphors) plates you've kept spinning eventually fall.
  - alfor 4y ago
    I like this explanation. Lot’s of multitasking, over consumptions of information and procrastination on my side. With med it’s like I am more calm and energized at the same time. Made me see how most people see the world for the first time.
zamnos 4y ago
Missed Potential is the name of the band featuring everyone with ADHD who was called "smart but unmotivated" by their teachers, never got tested, and never derived the benefits of treatment. You're free to do whatever you want, but if someone in a wheelchair refused a simple surgery that would fix their problem, and said that people trying to help them walk were "jamming them into workflows", you'd really think that maybe the person in the wheelchair should get looked at.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  As someone who was diagnosed in my 30s, used medication for about eight years, then got off of it for about three years, I'm going to offer another viewpoint. I am grateful for the clarity I got with the meds, but something always felt off and I definitely talked too much. I finally decided to get back off meds, and my anxiety really subsided. By that time, I had built a pretty effective external structure of calendar, reminders, etc. to handle the ADHD aspects of my brain, but without the anxiety to also deal with (which ramped up my ADHD exponentially), the ADHD is totally manageable and I don't feel so out of sorts and, for lack of a better term, "domesticated" into being what corporate America thinks they want. I get along just fine, and I attribute a lot of that to finding a job I enjoy and having a boss who is patient with my unpredictable, but important contributions.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Anxiety is really the crux of it. My psych prescribing anti-anxiety meds was life changing!
  - zamnos 4y ago
    If you've been on medication, and know the effects of it on you well, and you're able to put systems in place to overcome the shortcomings this legally recognized disability has afflicted you with (as well as the blessings), then absolutely be off medication as you please. Tis your life to live! But for those that haven't been on medication for extended periods, or even just tried medication at all, for whatever reason, be it fear pushed by anti-medication zealots, or an inability to access it; for those that are tired of their life failing for reasons that everybody else seems to just be able to do, medication is, sometimes literally, a lifesaver.
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board It's pretty unfair to characterize the demand as a desire to look nice, when in your next sentence you admit that a week task has taken you more than a month. I don't give a shit about the kanban board but I do care about work in progress. There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done. What you consider multi-threading is micro time slicing, with significant context switching costs. The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile, while me, an old fart in management, see a giant pile of have half-finished widgets collecting dust. Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work you'll never be successful with the newer approaches of continual delivery, and constant, small-scale, non-scary releases.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > when in your next sentence you admit that a week task has taken you more than a month The word 'admit' suggests you had to drag it out of him, that he's hiding slow progress behind a smoke screen of busy work like opening many tickets. That month-long background task wouldn't have had any work done otherwise so it's unfair to call it delayed. > Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work That's the problem with people who think they're technical managing the actual workers, they always end up micromanaging and slicing things into shapes that don't fit. The world isn't single threaded and changes usually aren't entirely unrelated. You should change your management style to simply specifying the business goals you want and asking for as many to be completed as possible. Let your team do what works best. > The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile No, because all those labels just encourage people to pick a style and do that thing regardless of circumstances. In a real project I've got to coordinate everything with someone. I can't push code without a review, I can't code to a team's API without sending them the spec for review, etc. During these times I could facebook like some others do, but instead I "multi-task" by doing other work. Also, it's not very obvious from simple metrics like number of lines of code committed which work is hard and which is simple fluff which can be fixed without a distraction. A change to a logger might percolate through every method call and appear big and complex despite having been made in seconds by the IDE. If I was implementing a new feature I'd probably want to update the logging style first rather than coding to the old standard, so I'd make the big change (probably covered by another ticket) because I'm already in there and have to test that stuff anyways. > There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done. As I said, there are a lot of down periods in that process. It feels like you think you know some deep secret ("only delivered features count!") that you think you can't get people to acknowledge. This is actually like day-one stuff in engineering school, that you need to measure benefit of your work in delivered advantages so done isn't done until it's in use. But there's a lot of other stuff as well, such as not delivering something until it's safe to use even if it works in test scenarios. You should have a discussion with your team about your idea and brainstorm where it fits into a full product development cycle and what has to be considered. I imagine you will find they don't discount it, but they have a wider view of the process than your business focused one, and that they have to balance all of this while also managing your perceptions.

CM30 4y ago

> When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. I think you basically summarised my own issues with work in the past, and why I seem to burn out so quickly. Wouldn't be surprised if I had ADHD tendencies as well as being on the autistic spectrum, and that explained why I get so sidetracked with different hobbies and jobs and activites rather than being able to stick with one or the other.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah I spent a long time with different people telling me I had adhd, or maybe autism. Or autism, but maybe adhd, they are similar in some ways after all. It turns out it's both, which is its own exciting thing and in some ways a very surprising or unintuitive combination of what you would expect. And also surprisingly, specialists for both struggled to identify it correctly. I'm not sure if I just got unlucky there or what. But yeah you might want to consider and look into what experiences are like for people who do have both, because it's not what I would have expected before I knew this about myself.

stavros 4y ago

I've been there, and it's hell. You waste your day staring at a screen, trying to get yourself to do something, but you can't, so in the end you both get absolutely nothing done and you waste all your time on it. It would almost have been better if I just said "fuck it" and didn't work at all. I'd have exactly the same output, but at least I'd have my free time back. If you're in this position, I recommend you work with your manager to find work you enjoy, or work with your peers to work on stuff together. It's always been helpful when I was talking to a colleague about doing small chunks of work at a time. It wasn't even that they were checking up on me, we'd just say "ok I'm going to work on adding this task to CI" "I'll work on this API", and then we synced back an hour later, and that seemed to help me focus.

zamnos 4y ago
If you're that executively dysfunctional to the point where it's affecting your career, then it's time to escalate the problem beyond what your immediate manager can provide (but do talk to them about this), and find a mental health professional that can help. everybody has their off days but if those days turn into months and then days and then years, it might be burnout, at which point you'll still want a mental health professional to help guide you through the troubles but it could be something else. like ADHD.
- stavros 4y ago
  In my case, I got a job I really enjoy doing, and I'm extremely productive at it, but I agree in general.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    That's great! Yeah I got a job in the incident response part of the industry because it turns out my brain will work if it thinks it's an emergency, and I'd like to think I've done quite well for myself.

rtpg 4y ago

There are definitely people who have ADHD and are simply not diagnosed, as well as people who are "afraid of" medication for reason X. For people who are unsure about this, though, ADHD having-ness is not 100% equivalent to "being unable to do your job with focus". Like parent mentions, ADHD is fundamentally about low executive control. So if you find yourself often saying things and immediately regretting it (often mid-phrase), having trouble with addictive behavior, and otherwise just doing things and regretting them in social spheres (as you "know better" in theory), then it could fall in there. The social issues that come up with ADHD are an under-rated aspect of the disorder, and rules out a lot of the "it's not ADHD it's capitalism" stuff. If you just can't concentrate at work... might be something else. Handling ADHD with meds can make your life better, but at the end of the day your job might just not work for you.

acdha 4y ago
Yeah, I periodically think about the stigma ADHD had when I was a kid in the late-80/90s and wonder how many people have some degree of impact on their life but have resisted a formal diagnosis and treatment. Some people used to talk about medication like it was a lobotomy.
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  This was me. Unironically, my first few times actually finally trying medication not helping me very much is what made me get over the stigma. When it simply... didn't help much, rather than making me a pill-addicted raving addict, something clicked.
  - acdha 4y ago
    We’ve definitely talked about the cruel irony that my dad never got treatment for depression but tried basically every illegal thing he could get his hands on trying to self-medicate. The line in his mind between medicine and party drug was tragic.
danaris 4y ago
ADHD also isn't just one thing: it's a constellation of symptoms with similar causes, and two people can "have ADHD" and have very different subsets of those symptoms.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Whether this is the case quickly becomes apparent by working closely in tandem with the person, e.g. pair programming. It will be obvious within the first few minutes whether the person simply cannot hold a train of thought for as long as the problem requires. As you write, there are concrete ways of addressing this. On the other hand, it is also obvious when the lack of productivity stems not from a lack of focus but simply not having a mind suited to the job. I’ve seen people focus intently for hours to complete a task that would take most others on the team a few minutes, and not for lack of knowledge or training; their brain simply worked at a much slower speed. There is nothing that can be done to rectify this. These are thus the hardest people to empathetically fire, since you’re basically letting them go for not being smart enough for the job, despite being an extremely diligent worker.

TexanFeller 4y ago
Pairing is actually one of my most helpful strategies for keeping myself on task with boring tasks. People probably notice my ADHD much less when pairing with me. One reason remote work has destroyed my productivity is that pairing just can't happen in the same way.
- rdubz 4y ago
  interesting, I've had a much easier time pairing (and felt benefits like you describe) over Zoom. Pairing by actually having 2 people at a desk never felt very comfortable, but screen-sharing with each person on their own monitor etc. works great, IME. I'm curious what you've tried / why it hasn't worked...
  - trilobyte 4y ago
    Back in the day, about 15 years ago now, when I was pair-programming every day and trying to teach new people how to do it, everyone was awkward at first. People who were Vim experts suddenly started stumbling over basic tasks. All of them who persisted eventually got over the awkwardness. Not all of them enjoyed the pair programming, but the ones who I talked to later found that it wasn't as awkward after a bit.

davidktr 4y ago

Oh god, this is so much me. I seem physically incapable of executing any task beyond 80%. Otherwise I work very quick and thorough, so it takes a long time for others to catch on. Medication helps a lot, but not in that regard. No matter what, I cannot explain this issue to anyone, not even therapists. It's sad to think I'll never progress beyond what I currently do because of this.

zamnos 4y ago
Have you tried different medication? Your psychiatrist may be able to help with that missing 20%.
operatingthetan 4y ago
>I seem physically incapable of executing any task beyond 80%. I think this is what happens to me. I have a bunch of home improvement projects that I started, did 80%ish of, then stopped and started another one. It's not a problem at work because I graduated to manager at some point.

devinprater 4y ago

Oh wow, maybe that my problem then.

tr3ntg 4y ago

I hear this all the time, and these workplace-focused descriptions of "phases of underperformance" really apply to me, but I don't think it's ADHD. I can focus on all sorts of things when I try, and when I look up symptoms of ADHD, maybe just 5% apply to me. For me, I've joined new teams and crushed it for a few weeks where it was at least expected performance, but then I quickly fall off a cliff for seemingly no reason. Anxiety compounds this, and I can identify why I've sometimes been slow to crawl out, but the initial fall is always difficult to diagnose.

gavinmckenzie 4y ago
I was diagnosed ADD (or what would now be called inattentive ADHD) in my 30s. But the testing results were not clear, in part because I'd developed a lifetime of coping mechanisms and skills that allow me to behave in non-ADHD ways through force of will. If I look back at my primary school report cards, they are a mixture of both gifted and below-average performance with teacher comments like "Does amazing work when he applies himself". That sudden lack of motivation or drop in performance on tasks that we previously excelled at is also classic ADHD. Anxiety is often a comorbidity, stemming from a feeling of inconsistent failure and lack of control. Though my understanding is that anxiety may be more present in women sufferers of ADHD where the disease manifests differently than in men. All of this to say that you may feel like a DSM definition of ADHD doesn't map onto your experience, but that may be because you're an adult who has a lifetime of adaptation.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  I'll be 60 in a few months and looking back I've tended to think that anxiety has been the main thing that held me back in my career, but I can also relate to the post above where they say they do great in the early days of a job/project, but as time goes on find it more and more difficult to stay engaged. I guess I would think this is caused by anxiety in my case, but now I'm wondering if maybe there isn't more going on. I also got mixed results in school: gifted in subjects I liked, average/below averages performance in subjects I didn't care much about. So maybe there's always been a bit of an issue, but I also tend to think that it's much worse since the advent of smart phones - I think there may be a lot of us who were either not ADHD or just on the edge of being ADHD that have been pushed over the edge by being constantly connected.

schneems 4y ago

> Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity. This list is good. Also there are communities to learn from and therapy is really important. A provider said to me “therapy without medication is okay, I wouldn’t do medication without therapy”. Also it’s important to remember that people with ADHD excel in areas that neuro-average people do not. In an ideal team people work together to accentuate each other’s strengths and build systems that work for everyone.

7speter 4y ago

Heh, its been fun finding out that I have adhd, then finding out I have sleep apnea. Before I was just lazy.

Fr0styMatt88 4y ago

This is so timely. I’ve recently had a performance review and distractibility and ending sprints with multiple, unfinished tasks is a huge problem that got flagged and that I need to work on. The frustrating thing is I’ve done multiple ADHD self-tests and quizzes (like the ASRS) and Asperger tests (like the Aspie Quiz) and I’m always just on the border or right in the middle for both (eg- two grey boxes on the top of the ASRS instead of three IIRC and almost equal parts Aspie and equal parts normal on the Aspie Quiz). Even still I can relate to this. I know people with really severe ADHD that affects all aspects of their lives and I don’t think I fit that category, but at the same time I have to look at the external indicators (current job performance, being told by multiple people I’m likely ‘on the spectrum’, etc) and they make me unsure of my own judgement of myself. This is more complicated by the fact I was blind for some time after I was born and people in that situation often have autistic traits (‘blindisms’) so it’s really hard to know what traits come from where.

anotheruser13 4y ago
You might want to see a neuropsychologist and go through a formal testing process. I've had inattentive ADD all my life, but was not diagnosed until I was in my 40s. I often wonder how my life would be different if I'd been diagnosed and treated earlier in life. Fortunately I don't worry about that.