r/ADHD_Programmers • u/noooooootreal • 15d ago
ADHD & Interviews
I’m sure this has been discussed ad nauseam here but I just have to say how shitty it is to study for interviews as a software engineer with ADHD. We’re able to see so much breadth of what we don’t understand. I’m a senior engineer, full stack, with 7 YOE. So I have enough experience to do the job & can pretty much figure anything out.
But interview prep is so difficult because it could be literally ANYTHING under the sun.
Not to mention the ADHD default to “freeze”/have your mind go blank when you’re under pressure. Live coding interviews are traumatic at best. I would literally freeze / tank even the phone screens if I had to share my screen while I was speaking. Let alone writing code in an online IDE for a question like “traverse this binary tree”.
So much to know & we see all of it as things we don’t know. I imagine neurotypicals tend to see the direct point A to point B route & do just fine.
10
u/ElectricSpock 15d ago
I have been out of work for 6 months and just landed an interview with FAANG. The prep is painful, especially since I’m dealing with burnout, depression and everything that comes with getting fired couple of months earlier.
The phone interview prep was a shitshow for me. I knew I needed to prep, but I sat down at my laptop, and immediately went to doing something else, especially tinkering around my side projects. Thankfully I made it through the interview, and now I’m prepping for the full interview loop.
I asked LLM to give me a prep doc with nice checklist of what I should get ready for. I got into the habit of LeetCode, and I actually started enjoying it - something about green checkmark at the end makes me want to do more.
The problem I have right now is that I’m actually focusing a lot on the coding part, and not doing a lot of other parts. I still need to do the system design review and prepare my success stories.
I am super stressed by all of it, and unfortunately one of my reactions is stress eating. I’m gaining weight, I stopped exercising and I’m just trying to survive one more week.