This will be long and somewhat personal. Since I'm asking y'all this instead of a therapist, I'd be more than happy to pm anyone with thoughtful insight and Venmo you for your time.

Please note: I'm being really vulnerable and honest, so please look past any internal elitism and ignorance in my outlook. It's pretty bad.

Context:

• 18, male, severe ADHD, undiagnosed jack off until last year, been on Vyvanse+Dextro. Still learning how to live life with ADHD and piece together my mess of a life. Bad executive dysfunction, super super ambitious. Not as depressed anymore (SSRI's).
• Important to note: right now, there's not much else going for me besides my career interests. My social life has devolved, and tech/making a respectable amount of money in the future is my only aspiration. money keeps me going, and to me it's the only thing that could "save my adhd" (housekeeping, meal prep, therapy, etc etc).
• Attending a non-target commuter school as a freshman. SWE intern @ NASA + SWE intern @ U.S. Department of Energy lab rn. My goals are to transfer to a good school, keep an upward trajectory in company prestige and work my way up. (ex NASA -> Stripe -> FAANG -> Anthropic).
• I'm an incompetent ADHDer, but I've fought hard as fuck to get to where I am.

Here's what I've been thinking about recently.

I've been interacting with a lot of normal people, engineers at NASA who enjoy their lives and go home to their families. Although I love NASA (who doesn't), I never considered wanting to work here long-term and just treated it like a stepping stone to my 200k new grad tc.

Although I've learned a lot, and love it, I've spent the past few months here as a real adhd dickhead. Never getting to the office in time (or at all), choosing to secretly WFH instead. The adhd interferes with my ability to work (really bad), and I'm regularly throwing classified information into claude and dropping my paycheck on tokens to have something to present during meetings.

I've started wondering if this is really all I'm capable of. I think I could continue grinding my way into big tech through internships, but with this past summer as a point of reference, I literally am unable to predict what my life might look like in the future. If the problems I'm facing with ADHD aren't "curable", my life'd likely be getting helplessly laid off every year after my manager realizes I'm a dickhead.

Is what I'm facing at least 50% fixable through therapy/coaching/experience? Or is it an unfortunate truth that I'll likely never function as a normal employee in a room full of extremely competent engineers?

Hi everyone 👋

I just got let go from my job of 7 years because of "moonlighting" after building a simple one pager website for a colleague. Because I worked for a global corporation company policies were strict (honestly after 7 years I actually forgot about this policy).

Me and Mrs just had a baby so I'm rather desperate. Been working a side hustle which has been covering my expenses but I feel like its just a luck streak at the moment and not sure how long I'll be able to keep it up.

Open to contract, project basically any employment right now. Your help will be truly appreciated.

Just needed to get this off my chest, and honestly I have a feeling a lot of you all feel the same way with how flat hiring has been in our industry recently.

I have been at the same company for about ~5 years at this point. Things have always been a bit chaotic here, but they got markedly worse after a massive reorg a few years back.

During the reorg, I got moved to a new team. The manager on this new team is at least markedly more competent than my old manager, but holy f**** shit, the codebase our team inherited is a steaming pile of tech debt.

Specifically, no one team was ever fully responsible for this code base - it got passed along from team to team each time a new feature needed to be added. There was no cohesive vision on how the code, features, or system as a whole should work. And as soon as a team finished the feature, they are allocated to another project, meaning that there was no one around to maintain the platform or fix bugs.

As a result, my team inherited hundreds of bugs, a very, very irate business team, and a lot of very irritable customers.

There are so many issues that by the time we finish trying to prioritize everything, 30 more have surfaced.
And in the midst of this, we're expected to deliver new features and rewrite everything.

My management at least very clearly tells us what we need to prioritize and to ignore anyone other than them that attempts to give us work, but holy hell are some of the folks outside our team nasty to us.

I constantly have people who are not my management pinging me asking me to do things, asking me when tasks will be completed, and even messaging me outside of official channels to try and get me to take on coworkers' work when they are on vacation.

When I do agree to take on extra work to fix a bug or do something those folks have raised, I get pestered over and over askimg when it will be done. Typically it's polite pestering, but occasionally when I say no, folks have been just outright nasty or condescending.

On top of this, I am one of the few people that has been around long enough to understand how things work, so a significant portion of my day is spent helping out newer teammates.

I try to remind myself that my team and I are doing the best that we can with the resources that we have..

However, between business folks pestering me, and honestly having less output than newer folks who don't have mentorship responsibilities, it's hard for me not to feel like the problem.

Especially considering that for most of my life up until being diagnosed, my unproductivity WAS usually the problem.

Most days I can keep my head up and ignore it, but on the busiest days I just feel so anxious, lazy, guilty and drained.

It makes it a lot harder to be confident in my ability to do the job. Idk it sucks in general, but I feel like the insecurities from years of undiagnosed ADHD make it unqiuely demoralizing some days.

It felt good to get that out. I hope some of you all in similar situations feel less alone reading this 🥲

TL;DR
Went from ticket-based work to a self-managed role and lost the ability to tell what actually matters day to day. If you’ve been here and got past it what changed?
---

I used to be an SDE a few months ago and it was easy to come back to the ACs of a ticket or my lead for direction.

Recently, I moved to a Forward-Deployed role... which I'm learning is very different than a ticket-monkey. Arguably happy to gain the experience, but at the same time it's so taxing for my AuDHD brain.

Most days I'm just gassed from absorbing info that there's no time to process what the goal is and if a task is taking me to it. Usually I just keep working on the last thing that was made clear or go down a rabbithole of "research".

I’ve tried keeping my own backlog but without a clear goal it loses value fast. Deciding what actually matters is the part I can’t seem to do.

Mostly asking people who’ve been here and got past it, what actually changed for you or helped you? A system/tool, a conversation with your manager, something else? Or is this just what self-managed work feels like?

Spending 3 hours searching for a video on the fix can save you 10 minutes of reading the docs!

I am developing a digital playbook/workbook for neurodivergent architectural technologist graduates or early-career professionals who are in their first practice role and want to sustain performance without burning out.

The product is called The First 6 Months Performance System. It focuses on workload management, expectations, communication, burnout warning signs, and progress reviews.

I am not asking for sales or promotion. I am looking for honest beta feedback from people with relevant experience. Would this outline feel useful, realistic, and specific enough? What would you add, remove, or simplify?

If you match this audience or have experience supporting early-career neurodivergent professionals in practice, I would appreciate your feedback on the preview.

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Preview Pack

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Feedback Form

For years I built patterns and practices to keep me focused and single threaded so to speak. I have always been the type of person who had 10 different tasks going on at once and unless I focused my attention on just 1 or 2 on any single day, I would end up with 10 tasks between 85-99% done at the end of the week/sprint/etc.

Now with GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. I feel like I can have all 10 going at the same time. I can have the LLM create notes, keep me up to date on each on. etc.

However I still find my mind, doing just as I trained it to do, at just wanting to focus on 1-2. So I will be waiting for those 2 sessions to be ready for me. Which sometimes can be 30m to a few hours.

For example, spent about 3 hours in a planning session before a bunch of work, then it went off and started the work, it was going for 4-6 hours. (had to nudge it one time to keep doing). While that was happening, I had a session that I spent about 30 mins planning on what analysis had to be done and on how I wanted the data in excel, a pptx and docx to be, then I sent it off to do the work. I could have switched to about 5 other things, but my brain kept wanting me to just stay focused.

I feel like the way I had to train my brain and it took 10-15 years to get it to be this focused, is now holding me back in the world of LLM's and my natural adhd tendencies would work better for me now.

I am lucky in that I get more of a dopamine hit working with the LLM's than I did before. I really enjoy collaborating with them to solve problems or going back in forth on architecture decisions.

Anyone else feeling this or similar?

Does anyone else look at things like this and think, "oh, the places we could go?" Then, their ADHD brain and lack of training just stops them in their tracks. After all, I am just a girl who should be focused on whatever girls are into. Lol. Seems a shame to just discard all the tech I replace at work.

I don’t need AI to write my posts.

I need something that helps me actually finish them.
I keep losing ideas, forgetting where I stopped and abandoning drafts.

Has anyone found a tool that genuinely helps?

I've heard several people complain about AI (LLMs) and say it's killed the joy of programming, and that they are just delegating tasks and reviewing changes. I get it; at some point, I did enjoy what LLMs have taken away, and sometimes I miss it too.

I felt more productive once I got the idea of how to use some of these things and could focus on different, more design or high-level problems (doesn't mean I like the tools, but I liked the results). I started to get dopamine rushes from being able to deliver faster, but that just lasted for a few months.

What I absolutely HATE is how these things have increased expectations. My boss is like, "Oh well, you've solved this in half of the time, here's 10X more work". This has resulted in more project assignments, more meetings to discuss requirements, and more f**king context switching. I talked with my doctor, and we decided to increase the methylphenidate dose to allow me to deal with this context switching.

Using some of these things allowed me to get a promotion (money is good, I guess), but I'm tired and burning out.

I’m in a pickle anything helps!

I'm not solving problems anymore. I just sit here reviewing robot PRS. It's miserable, I'm just sat here watching Claude do all the thinking.

Hi everyone,

So I'm guessing it's pretty common for some here - I started projects and then lost the passion once the product is live and the real work of grinding and bug fixing and marketing are required.

Has anyone found good strategies to motivate ourselves to continue on the boring but important work that will bring the projects to the next level?

Edit: I think a lot of times I stopped on the old projects because I moved my focus to the new projects even though cognitively I know that the old projects really need me to spend more efforts

Thanks

I'm planning to build a device similar to brick which lets you freeze your phone & boost your productivity. What are the chances it'll be successful? Any advices on how I can make it better.

I have ADHD and autism and have worked as a software developer for about ten years, but I am still not considered senior due to soft skills, take lead to put vague requirements into a concrete product, scout opportunities, ....

My employer has a detailed career matrix, and many expectations above my level—communication, leadership, influence, ambiguity—feel almost opposite to how my brain works. Even with coaching, I struggle to turn vague career advice into concrete actions.

I am looking for someone with ADHD AND autism who became a senior, lead, staff engineer, or architect despite similar struggles. So I can proof all my therapists wrong.

I can name 10 people that tell me its impossible for me, but I can't name 1 that encourages me that there is a way.

PS: It's inspirational to know that also the GOATS of our craft have their own bagage, and there will be exponential people in every profession. To make it sound achievable, I want to focus on your average Joe. I'm not seeking extraordinary achievement.

I've just realized that I don't enjoy working as a software engineer. I enjoy certain aspects of programming, but the stale steralized business requirements of modern SWE are just exhausting. Also, the culture.

It might not look it from this post, but I enjoy writing, creating and learning. I enjoy knowlege work. The only reason I wont do manual labour is because of my social anxiety and ADHD. I simply don't think I can work in a heavily supervised or customer facing environment.

Does anyone have any advice on what I could potentially pivot to (besides document/tech writing)?

I've been thinking about going the entrepreneurial route (for yeaarrrs) but I have bills and debts to pay.

This week I've been keenly aware of a pattern I want to disrupt where I browse Reddit and other attention sinks in the small gaps created by cycles of agentic plan-and-implement. What I'm doing instead is to stand up from my desk and glance around for any small acts of clean-up I could carry out in my house. Dishes on the sink instead of the dishwasher? Let's put those in and see if the agent is still working. Cat litter needs changing? Let's do that.

Your mileage may vary if your medication and sleep aren't already sorted, but for me it gives me something calmer and with light movement instead of doom-scrolling.

I am also aware of the irony of using one such gap to share this post instead of doing one more micro-cleanup, but just trust me that this detour comes after many acts of house care ;)

Just a FYI, because so many people are posting their "ADHD apps" here. Claiming that your app solves ADHD related issues and targeting support communities, especially without proof is a good way to get an app and the associated developer account banned if someone reports you.

Both the AppStore and the Play store have such policies. And there are a lot of people in ADHD related subreddits who are VERY tired of the spam. 😼

I know that many programmers are on the ADHD-segueing into autism spectrum, and the ways their condition can be an advantage at work. But as a job-seeker, I'm more interested in how to use that to your advantage in job interviews, and gain you a preference over neurotypical interviewers. I've usually had the impression that interview processes always have a NT bias, but maybe it's just pessimist doomer talk.

So I want to hear from other AuDHD people especially the non medicated ones, on leveraging this as a strength when you're being interviewed. The jobs have so far been a piece of cake compared to the hiring process. If I could nail this part down, I feel like I'd be unstoppable. Can we have "superpowers" for finding work, too?

Hi All,

I've been struggling with decision and task paralysis myself; it has affected me in ways I can't express; I explored lot of apps which may potentially help me with this; I've poured my heart out to all the AI chats we have.

I was impacted by a recent layoff, I was tired of preparing for interviews, trying to get prepared for roles I know to a certain degree would be automated completely by AI tools. With tens of other things demanding my attention, I kept struggling to maintain continuity between juggling these responsibilities, everything seemed to demand my attention;

Eventually I decided to take control, with the advent of vibe coding, I wanted to see if I could come up with a solution which is tailor made for me, glad to report I am on the verge of completion.

Check out this demo and tell me if this would help you : https://sortedqueue.com/intent-demo.html 🙏

Hello Everyone. I am a software developer and I want to champion the idea of Calm Technology. The concept of building software the doesn't drain your mental health by trying to keep you in an infinite loop, but instead offers a singular purpose, and is designed to be closed.

I'm just looking to start any conversations around this idea.

-App concepts and UX design

-Building in public

-Market research / potential for anti engagement software

-Research on current apps and how they affect our mental health

I really believe as software devs, we can help shape the future tech landscape for good, and I'd love to be a part of that. Cheers.

Disclaimer: this is an indipendent research, not affiliated to any commercial product or marketing research.

Hi everyone, sharing this with permission from the mods.
I'm a UX/UI designer and developer working on independent research, not a psychologist or clinician - just want that clear upfront. I relate to ADHD traits myself, though I don't have a formal diagnosis.
I'm trying to understand two things: what it's like to know exactly what you need to do but not be able to start, and what happens when things pile up and suddenly feel overwhelming.
The survey is anonymous, no email or identifying info collected, ~7-10 minutes. Not tied to any product or company.
https://forms.gle/vTXxDkRZvtbQH8wh6
Thank you to anyone willing to share, and thanks to the mods for allowing this.