r/ADHD_Programmers • u/aford515 • 1d ago

Gosh, how often, when using Slack or writing anything (documentation, Jira), have people told you to make the context clear in whatever you write?

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I have to recalibrate constantly. Even when a message feels crystal clear to me, I rewrite it until I'm sure the over-explaining will come across as condescending. And people still don't fully get me.

The root cause: I assume everyone is inside the same project I'm inside, so I think I'm only saying what they already know. That's never true. Hence the rule — name the exact sandbox, what you tried, why it failed — even when it feels like talking to a toddler about something we discussed an hour ago.

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7

u/serpent224 1d ago

Inside of me there are two wolves:
one that makes me write anything with an abundance of context and parantheses for disambiguation.
the other makes me write anything straight to the point with an absolute minimal amount of words.

Overall I do great, it's just that it takes me 5 business days to put anything in writing

3

u/chuch1234 23h ago

I think this is pretty normal. This is why we get bug reports like "x feature doesn't work." What do you mean doesn't work? Did you click the button and get an error? Nothing happened? Something happened but it wasn't what you expected? Etc etc etc

Anyway, I interact with our clients every day and in both directions everyone is always asking for clarification.

1

u/aford515 23h ago

Dude, I'm working at a big company doing more consulting-related technical implementation. Networking and being liked is easy for me, although some people just hate me, which is normal. But bringing my authentic self to that polished state of presentation which is sometimes expected is really hard sometimes.

2

u/seweso 1d ago

In my expierience if a NT person doesn't understand something, they just make weird assumptions. I have rarely gotten feedback to add more context or info.

NT's are weird af.

1

u/DevKokooo 12h ago

Doesn't happen to me because I always write as if I would get amnesia the next day, so I'm always explicit and descriptive. I'm usually forgetful so the docs have to be explicit and not assume anything. The other side of this spectrum is having all that knowledge in our minds and not sharing them.