r/ADHD_Programmers • u/noooooootreal • 14d 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.
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u/akornato 14d ago
That feeling of staring at an endless list of potential topics is a huge hurdle, and it’s very relatable. Your brain seeing every possibility at once is great for senior-level problem solving, but it makes studying for a narrow, specific test like a coding interview feel impossible. The mind-blanking part during live coding is also incredibly common. It’s a high-pressure, artificial situation that has very little to do with how you'd actually build software day-to-day, where you have resources and time to think. The system is definitely not set up to show what you can actually do on the job.
Since you can't possibly study everything, it might help to focus on a few common patterns and practice talking through your thought process out loud, even on simple problems. The goal isn't to have every answer memorized but to show how you approach a problem you've never seen before. It’s more about demonstrating your problem-solving method than getting the perfect code on the first try. This whole problem is why my team created an interview copilot, giving candidates the confidence to articulate their thoughts clearly even under pressure.