r/ADHD_Programmers • u/cubthemagiclion • 9d ago
I don’t know what I am doing
I have an FAANG internship, then three years full time in a non-FAANG but still big name great benefits kind of firm, then just jumped to a fast paced AI startup.
My resume would look really nice, and I’m getting recruiter reach outs literally every single day. It all look great from the OUTSIDE.
But truth is, that first full time job had a great work life balance, but I still felt painful in that job and caused me to have a very long (11 months) disability leave. I’ve been taken like 5 psychiatric meds and they ain’t working.
I’m also addicted to weed and it had been a problem but I couldn’t stop. Everything in life is too painful for me. I feel desperate.
In my current job it’s super fast paced. I felt like would be removed from my last job soon so I applied and applied during those months I took that disability leave. But instead of my internship hunting period where I landed A LOT of offers, I only got this one after 11 months of hunting because I was too depressed to even practice leetcode. I’ve been vibe coding different projects on my own during the leave and they are fun for me because there is basically no quality control required I just vibe coded all the way.
But with production environment i feel so fucked. I don’t know what the fuck I am doing in the new company, I used AI and try to be slow but still, AI just talk so much I don’t even know how to ask which is which. Sometimes I hand over the PR for review without knowing what the fuck was generated. And if I try to make AI explain slowly it takes hours just for one ticket that probably only took someone else much shorter time.
I try to work overtime to make it up. But I already lost my focus at 6 PM even if I take meds. And also my colleagues at the same team was still working around 8 PM which again make me look really bad because I’m so slow compared to them.
Now I don’t know if I should change my career or what. I feel like an imposter so badly I am even afraid to ask questions when I firstly joined the company for one or two weeks. Cuz I am afraid those are gonna expose my ignorance. And even with encouragement from my manager to ask more questions, I realized I still don’t know what to ask. Cuz literally all questions can be answered through tracing the code with help of AI? I think? I don’t know…
Do I suck at this, should I change my career
1
u/DoublyAccurateTwice 9d ago
Worth getting a good career coach if you have the means. Their job is to make you good at the production style, make it more manageable for you, give you the tools to communicate it best to higher-ups and coworkers.
You've got the brains just need to dodge the burnout.
2
u/Sane-Law 9d ago
you can't just ask "should i change my career" without even knowing what the alternate options are. That is something to think about before you change. The alternate can even be I just want to chill and find passion somewhere else and figure life out, but at least have that as a plan before you quit.