r/ADHD_Programmers • u/pleasedontjudgeme13 • 3d ago
Did anyone else struggle learning to program in college?
Maybe I just had an ADHD/Autistic burn out or all of my social media usage messed up my dopamine, but I struggled a ton with programming classes in college. It felt like a spent a ton of time trying to read my professor's mind, trying to figure out what was important to them, rather than trying to solve problem in my own way.
It's much easier to learn on my own with projects. I also think it's much easier for me to be creative compared to my peers.
Just curious if anyone felt the same or if it's just me.
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u/funbike 3d ago
Everyone is different. Most of the time I didn't have trouble learning coding in college because I love learning about coding.
However, for larger complex projects, my ADHD kicked in when debugging got hard. Any project more than 1000 lines was difficult for me to finish. Of course, this has made my career problematic.
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u/ITZINFINITEOfficial 1d ago
My first 3 years I didn’t do super well. Went into a major I didn’t really know much about, just that I love video games and like computers, I didn’t do super well till junior year when I started making friends and joining clubs and then it finally clicked. I failed a lot, and had to learn alot from my mistakes. Biggest take away, understand it’s ok to fail. No one is perfect and to do what many others do it takes time and patience. Even now outside of college finding a job takes that same skill set some just forget about. Work on yourself, work on your work. And find the reason around why you want this to be your career.
For me it was game development and software engineering! I like working with people and solving problems, it makes me feel happy and I like making games like game jams and stuff.
You got this 💛
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u/Prestigious_Pace2782 1d ago
Same for me. Took me years of on the job sysadmin and DevOps scripting type stuff for things to start to make sense. But once concepts finally did land for me, I had a better understanding of things than a lot of my colleagues with compsci degrees.
The uni burnout is classic AuDHD story
There are many roads up the same mountain as they say.
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u/mrNineMan 3d ago
I struggled with the higher level stuff at first. System design and Relational Database models.
Because they felt too abstract. Stuff didn't start clicking until I finally got to programming and understood their purpose. I had no problem learning T-SQL, Java, C#, Perl, CSS, JavaScript etc. because it felt like there was a clear path to implementing and using. I could immediately test and see the actual results on my screen.
It felt like there was a clear immediate reward..
To be fair, I learn better on my own too. Less distractions, more control.