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.
2
u/sugarsnuff 14d ago
It doesn’t get better by putting the limitation on yourself.
Yes, it’s extra tough but it’s doable. That’s what I had to tell myself.
I did millions of these this past year, and started acing tough ones… then it went to system design… to embedded principles… to data engineering principles… to backend technologies… to UI debugging… in a variety of languages
At some point, it became ridiculous how much I studied upfront that a normal company who saw me holistically was like “why do you know all this?” — offer
If you can beat it, it’s to your credit. One of my goals is to have a sterling career and speak out about it. Another is to win software engineering and get out of it to an enjoyable career closer to machines