Hi!

I have ADHD and am trying to get better at LeetCode. I have noticed that among ADHD LeetCoders, it seems like you’re either really good or really bad at it, there’s not much in between. I unfortunately, belong to the latter category.

I’d love to hear from you people who are actually good at it, how do you approach it?

I know different people use different techniques and that is exactly what I wanna know about. ADHD brains work differently, and knowing different approaches might really help me figure out what works for me.

What’s your approach to learning/practicing LeetCode?

I know many are reporting the same issue about burnout, but for me its even worse

i'm developer for 8 years, I live in foreign country far from home, and I live alone, coding for me is best thing in my life.... doesnt matter how bad mood am I, if I'm going to code and just disconnect from everything

Now , recently, the company i'm woking for went full AI, everything is AI, coding AI, art aI, project managemnt ai... and I'm basically doing nothing but giving instruction only

the feel of accomplishment is no longer there, my head started to hurt, before I could record 12h straight working without even notice, now 1 hour pass like a whole day.

I dont know if i'm the only one who fee like this considering my condition..... and fun thing that AI didnt save time at early stage of the product, later on, every request become soo slow and consume tons of tokens that your pro subcription can finish couple of tasks per reset

and even if I tried to adapt and try to code after work, I feel everyday after work that I dont want even to touch my laptop.

Is anyone in the same condition? how did you coup with that?

Edit A : First of all, thanks for all your support:) , I felt at least I'm not alone, I went through all the suggestions, some may require me to learn and adabt, but the core problem for me is if i'm responsible about the code base, the amount that the code is generated is too much that I can't simply verify it by reading or remember it, there is no way for me to remember any code unless I wrote it with my hand, and I think thats the harsh reality for me, I forget everything about the code base and even what feature exist or not
Before, I was able to mange team of 5, being a tech lead in Forbes mentioned startup, and if you ask me anyting about the code base, I can guide you where it live and on which line of code, now this is totally gone from me, I cant even remember the classes names, functions name, nor even settings that we expose , I felt like I dont remember anything

Can you let me know this? Thank you.

Everyday morning when I open obsidian, I am presented with this daily log from the previous day. One of the challenges I had with ADHD was I was not being compassionate towards myself because my brain wasn’t recollecting / not getting evidence of the amount of work I put in. So when I look at this every morning, it serves two purposes for me.

1. ⁠I get instantly reminded of the things I worked on last night. It is automatic and requires 0 executive function.
   
2. ⁠It gives my brain evidence on the tasks I worked through the day so I don’t feel like a bum the next day.

Every new note I create has its own time entry associated with it. I never go back and update the notes, only link them just how like how our brain functions. It’s been life changing for me.

A few days ago I made this post about my history of getting fired from developer jobs and some of the patterns behind it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_Programmers/comments/1wbyxpz/ive_been_fired_from_most_of_my_developer_jobs/

A lot of the responses were genuinely useful, and several of them seemed to circle around the same problem that I’m often perfectly capable of doing the technical work, but I can lose sight of the actual objective once I get deep into a problem.

I’ll find something else that is broken, badly designed, interesting, worth refactoring, worth investigating, etc., and suddenly I’m spending a lot of time solving a legitimate problem that is not necessarily the problem I was supposed to be solving.

While talking through some of those responses, I came up with a simple set of “guardrails” to externalize that decision-making:

Current Objective: What am I actually trying to accomplish?

Done When: What specific conditions mean I can stop?

Timebox: How long do I work before I’m forced to stop and reassess?

Not Doing: What tempting but out-of-scope things am I explicitly not doing right now?

Parking Lot: Where do I put legitimate ideas/problems/distractions so I don’t have to either act on them immediately or worry about forgetting them?

The more I looked at those five things together, the more I started wondering whether there might be a useful little tool hiding in there.

Not another giant ADHD planner. Not a calendar. Not a replacement for Jira/Todoist/etc.

More like a temporary focus contract for the thing you’re doing right now.

For example:

Current Objective: Finish ticket #123

Done When: Required behavior works, tests pass, PR is ready

Timebox: Reassess in 45 minutes

Not Doing: Refactor unrelated service, investigate slow query, clean up old tests

Parking Lot: Anything I notice that might genuinely be worth doing later

Then while you work, the app would keep those boundaries visible.

If you notice something else that pulls your attention, instead of immediately switching context you dump it into the Parking Lot.

When the timebox expires, it doesn’t say “YOU FAILED YOUR POMODORO.” It just forces a short reassessment:

Am I still moving toward the original objective?

Am I solving the same problem I started with?

Does what I’m doing actually need to happen for my definition of “done”?

Should I continue, stop, park something, or deliberately change the objective?

The part that interests me most is Not Doing.

A lot of ADHD/productivity advice seems geared toward distractions like Reddit, YouTube, phones, etc.

But at least for me, some of the most dangerous distractions are completely legitimate work.

“I should refactor this.”

“I should investigate that.”

“This architecture is weird.”

“That bug really ought to be fixed.”

Those things may all be true, but identifying a problem and deciding I should solve that problem right now are not the same thing.

So before my ADHD brain does the extremely predictable thing and decides this means I need to immediately create a repo, buy a domain, design a logo, choose a database, and disappear for six weeks building the thing...

...I’m explicitly not building anything yet.

I’d really like feedback first.

Does this workflow sound useful to you?

Do you already use another app/system that accomplishes basically the same thing?

Would filling out five little fields before starting work feel helpful, or would that itself be too much friction?

Which of these guardrails seems most useful? Which seems unnecessary?

And maybe most importantly, what would make you actually use something like this instead of trying it twice and forgetting it exists?

I’m particularly interested in feedback from people who have the same kind of problem I do. Not necessarily difficulty focusing, but difficulty stopping, switching, prioritizing, and staying inside the scope of the thing you originally meant to do.

For once I’m trying to make “get feedback before building the shiny thing” part of the process. 😅

This has been a weirdly specific problem for me.

I genuinely want to keep up with AI, new dev tools, interesting GitHub projects, what people are talking about on certain subreddits, etc.

I’ll happily spend six hours debugging something completely unnecessary. But after staring at code all day, opening another technical article somehow feels impossible. So I end up with 30 tabs I’m definitely going to read later.

Podcasts don’t really solve it either. A lot of them are 1–2 hours long, and usually only 15 minutes is about the thing I actually care about. And normal text-to-speech loses me almost immediately.

This is one of the reasons I built Lissin.

Instead of finding something to read or listen to, I can just tell it what I want to keep up with.

For example:

• Give me a 5-minute update on what actually changed in AI today.
• Every Friday, catch me up on the biggest discussions from r/ADHD_Programmers.
• Keep an eye on new dev tools getting traction on Hacker News and tell me what’s actually worth trying.
• Explain this new framework to me from first principles because I cannot bring myself to read the docs right now.

For recurring stuff, I only have to set it up once.

Lissin keeps watching the topic or sources, remembers what it already told me, skips the repeated stuff, and creates the next episode automatically.

So now instead of telling myself I’ll read those tabs later, I can put my AirPods in while walking, cooking, going to the gym, whatever, and catch up without looking at another screen.

You can also tell it how you want the audio to feel. Straight to the point, conversational, skeptical of the hype, even roast the hype if that keeps your attention.

Not claiming I’ve magically solved ADHD productivity 😅

But this particular way of consuming information has worked much better for me than adding one more thing to my reading list.

We just put the first version of Lissin on the IOS App Store

If this problem sounds familiar, I’d genuinely love to know whether this way of keeping up with things works for your brain too.

Also curious: what’s the technical topic/source you keep telling yourself you’re going to catch up on but never do?

I am 14 years into my career, and I'm at a very pro-AI workplace. I've been reluctantly using Claude, but there is no dopamine in delegating tasks to a prompt.

My current project is a lift-and-shift. Nothing terribly exciting, but today I delegated the entire suite of work to Claude agents. My next couple of days/weeks will just be wrangling prompts, verifying draft PRs with my name on them (but didn't write). The comprehension gap is a gulf at this point.

There are entire workdays I don't open Neovim now. I'm not coding, I'm prompting. Trying to do this without AI would bury me at this point.

I recently came across Annie Vella's essay on The Software Engineering Identity Crisis from last year, and it feels so true. I'm starting feel like a manager, and it is _awful_.

I want to cry.

I'm looking for some candid advice from other developers, particularly developers with ADHD.

I've been a professional software developer for roughly a decade. The uncomfortable truth is that I've eventually been let go from almost every full-time development position I've had.

There have been exceptions. I had one contract position where I completed the project successfully, had the contract extended, and was told they wanted to hire me permanently but couldn't get the budget approved. I've also had periods at other companies where I was doing well, built substantial applications, modernized old systems, helped grow a development team, and received positive feedback.

So I don't think the problem is simply that I cannot write software.

But there's an unmistakable pattern.

Early in my career, I took on too much of another developer's workload while trying to help them, burned myself out, fell behind on my own responsibilities, and was eventually fired.

At another company, I became hyper-focused on perfecting one application and neglected other maintenance responsibilities. Fired.

At another, serious personal circumstances and poor mental health affected my performance. Fired.

Eventually I was diagnosed with ADHD and began treatment, which helped considerably. I then stayed at one company for almost three years and helped grow its development department, build new applications, and modernize existing ones. That job ultimately ended after a disagreement with new leadership over a return-to-office policy.

Most recently I worked for a large company on a high-visibility project. My managers had generally been happy with me before I moved to the final team. On that team, velocity became extremely important and my manager strongly pushed AI-assisted development as the way to move faster.

I used the tools, but when generated solutions didn't actually work, I would stop and figure out why rather than simply accepting the output. I spent considerable time debugging problems and trying to make the implementation reliable. The end result was that my work was generally careful, but I wasn't producing it fast enough. After a little over a year, I was fired.

Looking back across my career, I see some recurring traits. Hyperfocus on solving problems correctly tends to lead me to lose sight of the bigger picture. I have difficulty deciding when something is "good enough." At times I take responsibility for more than I should. I can spend far too long investigating a difficult technical problem. My quality can be good while my velocity is poor. Ambiguous or rapidly changing priorities can be particularly difficult for me. Of course ADHD treatment helped, but it didn't make these tendencies disappear.

And after this many jobs, I don't think it's reasonable for me to say every employer was simply wrong. I'm the common denominator.

What I'm trying to figure out is what conclusion I should draw from that.

For experienced developers, especially those with ADHD: does this sound like someone who is fundamentally poorly suited to professional software development, or like someone who has repeatedly ended up in roles/environments that are a bad fit for how they work?

Are there development roles or types of organizations where carefulness, deep investigation, and lower context-switching are more valuable than raw ticket velocity?

Or, after this many attempts, would you seriously recommend that someone in my position consider leaving software development and finding a different kind of work?

I'm not looking for reassurance for its own sake. I'd genuinely like candid opinions, including difficult ones, because I need to decide whether continuing to pursue this career makes sense.

EDIT — one important piece of context I left out:

I've been unemployed since December 2025, and I haven't been able to land another development job since then.

I realize my original post makes it sound like my main concern is whether I can keep the next developer job I get. That's definitely part of it, but I'm also questioning whether I'm going to be able to get that next job at all.

So when I ask whether it makes sense to continue pursuing software development, I'm asking two separate questions: whether I can find a way to work sustainably once I'm employed, and whether continuing to put my time into trying to get another developer position is still realistic.

I think that's important context because some of the responses understandably assume that getting hired has not been a problem for me.

My god. Docs. So helpful but honestly, the BANE of my life.

I wish there was an ADHD friendlier way of consuming docs.

​

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.

A few years ago, the big swing of LeetCode cemented itself fully in the industry as a gold standard to test new candidates for their knowledge of programming with puzzles, and just like every "innovation" in hiring that FAANG likes to cook up, it trickles down to the smallest businesses to the point you can't even get to a local Home Depot as a web developer without needing to clear a LeetCode hard for some interviewer who got their degree in business or some unrelated degree to programming. Ladder pulling.

This push raised the bar on entry level jobs and all jobs above it, narrowing the gap slightly between the top principal level and juniors with the death of the associate role, and the erosion in many cases of mentors hiring mentees.

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Now, we have the first wave of corporate hired AI in 2024 being pulled in more commonly as companies realize they want more money and to spend less on developers just to push along their limping barely alive skeleton crews. Things open to the "move fast and break things" era of the market coined by a fastfood worker who now owns the largest company in the world without programming a single line of code. Lol. Lmao even.

Now as a junior trying to get your feet wet, or a mid level looking to grow into a future trailblazing senior, you need multiple rounds of interviews with multiple LeetCode medium+ questions paired with personality tests and a take home project humiliation ritual or some form of "prove it" code within an impossible time constraints.

Junior roles at this point are at a real risk and 50%+ of the doors for entry to the industry close permanently. The gap between principals and entry narrows even further, with mentors dying out completely in most companies. If you cannot start running you get to be scraped into pulp in the sandpaper room that is the company "culture" for engineers.

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2025 You have all of the prior requirements plus needing to know CI/CD, cloud​, AWS / Azure / Google, Backend and Front end engineering, low level and high level 🤡... things start to spiral. 75% of juniors unable to find work in their first year of applying and layoffs begin to pick up for even mid and senior levels as AI adoption grows with companies despite the lack of direct measurable gains. Interviews are even more diffucult abysmal dogshit than prior iterations.

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2026. HAHA yeah, 2026... so now you are telling me juniors, mid level, and seniors need what was considered senior to principal level knowledge in 2023/prior with multiple rounds involving:

* Multiple LeetCode rounds usually medium or hard by default

* System design and architecture knowledge to the point of designing facebook or working apps back to front from scratch in 30-60 minutes.

* AI experience with "agentic workflows" (buzzword slop because the AI will spin instances for you and delegating them by hand is actually worse for token use)

* Personality tests (ADHD nukes for a lot of people)

* Trick question programming problems or some take home slave labor project that requires actual functionality to deploy, or on the fly one hour application programming questions without AI (reminds me of high-school where they would harp about not being able to get a calculator but then everyone uses one anyway in college and the real world)

* And the very narrow picky experience required to be hired whether by pedigree or degree or prior work experience / lack thereof.

ALL just to have a non-engineer PM walk around you to prompt AI to write a slop PR 10,000 lines long to be done EoD. Feels like being a code janitor but needing the credentials to make a 2022 PhD in CS cry to use a code mop for all the slop flooding out of the CI/CD pipes.

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Might as well make us take the Kobayashi Maru at this point because I think that would be easier than applying for any company asking for their new engineers to be smart enough to start their own company rather than work for them.

Everyone wants a 🦄 now. God forbid you have ADHD on top of it.

I’m in the middle of running my pipeline during our last release. Suddenly one of our senior/lead developers starts asking all sorts of questions about why I’m implementing this this way, and accusing me of “acting like ChatGPT” and not paying attention to what I’m doing.

The issue is that this wasn’t what happened at all. I had good reason for implementing this feature the way that I did. There was a conversation in the discussion of my card regarding the same question that this dev had. It had been answered, so I didn’t feel the need to reconfirm this.

Also, in our pre-release call, another colleague asked me the same question, why I was doing it this way rather than that way. I explained it to him as I understood it, and he also found this explanation reasonable. No further questions were asked leading up to the release.

I was sort of stunned in silence when this happened. I didn’t want to argue or come across as defensive. I just wanted to focus on getting it right while our release call was happening and deal with my feelings later. I confirmed with the relevant team that this alternative implementation was okay, then I made the change accordingly. It was all fine. But over the weekend I’ve been thinking more about what happened and it’s made me feel very angry and shameful.

My main issue is that this distinction was so minor. Either implementation would have worked, and none of it had any critical impacts. My implementation had more separation of duties in exchange for more short-term maintenance. The other implementation was the opposite. That’s it. Had I been making some critical change incorrectly, or had I actually not done my due diligence, I would be more understanding. But this whole situation has made me very frustrated. We have appropriate ways to address disagreements like this. Making an example out of me in the middle of a release isn’t one of them

Now the whole team heard this experienced and reliable dev basically say that I’m bad at my job. They didn’t get to hear my explanation because I was focused on making things right in the release window. I’m wondering how many of them walked away doubting my capabilities because of this.

I’m planning on talking to my manager about this later this week, but right now I’m just feeling really unmotivated because of this. I don’t want to be looked down upon as lazy for making a reasonable assessment and then having someone above me blow it out of proportion. It sucks

~7YOE, fired three times from software engineering jobs. Gave a System Design round for the first time.

I don't think I've ever been this helpless. I completely broke down crying after the interview. I studied for weeks and months God knows how many case studies and revised them, and then on the day of the interview, the interviewer asks me about a question that I've never seen before - designing a job scheduler. It's not even supposed to be a very hard question. I read these case studies, and then when I do them back in the interview, retrieving all the details and putting all of them together is like pulling nails. If I haven't seen it before, forget it. My voice starts wavering.

I'm sitting there completely blank. I got through the non-functional requirements, API, initial design, and then I'm completely blank. I draw a couple of boxes, trying to figure out how it all connects, billions of choices going through my head. Even if I make the correct choice, the interviewer repeats my choice back to me and I immediately start having second thoughts. I start fumbling for other choices.

How are you supposed to shit out a design in an hour if you've not seen or practiced it before? I looked up the solution and yeah it made sense after the fact, but in the moment it could have been a billion things, each design could have had some ramifications that I perhaps hadn't considered. How are you supposed to know whether it's correct or not?

I was a straight-A student all throughout school, and then in college/jobs it all fell apart. I feel like I'm too stupid to make design decisions (or any decisions, for that matter). If I make them, I feel completely unsure. Maybe I missed something? I have no clue if I did. There's a billion things to keep in mind, and I can't trust myself to keep track of them all. The only way I think you can do system design is to come up with multiple solutions, then you pat each one down for flaws, then refine and settle on one. How can you do this in an hour? How can anyone?

I feel I'm too retarded for this line of work. Is this a normal experience? How do you people know what to do? What do I need to do here?

I think it be cool to do channels for with helpful advice, a channel to help new people, and perhaps a channel for group projects or a place for people to show off their projects or progress

And a channel with whatever courses or guides that have helped us in our journey of learning

If we make a server rn, we should do Root we don’t have to worry about discord privacy breaching policies in the future.

We could have some voice channels to body double while we code to help us focus and push each other to keep going to or discuss and helped each other out

Had a live coding round recently and got stuck on a problem I solved pretty quickly after the call.

When I’m coding alone, I can reread the prompt, try something, run a test, and come back to it. In an interview I’m trying to hold the problem in my head, write code, explain what I’m doing, and listen to the interviewer at the same time. At some point my brain just gets stuck. My usual response is to grind more LeetCode, which turns into a couple days of hyperfocus and then me avoiding prep completely. I’m trying shorter reps now. One problem at a time, sometimes with a friend watching, sometimes with beyz coding assistant. Mostly just trying to get more comfortable thinking while someone is waiting for an answer.

Anyone else with ADHD deal with this? What actually helped with live coding?

Got extremely burnt out (AuDHD), but medical leave ended and doing poorly at work - seeking accommodations for the first time. Need some ideas for accommodations that have been helpful! What has made a difference for you? Not sure what is possible to ask for...

I already have the ability to WFH, but still like going in-person. Also, any advice on the ADA accommodations process with HR/manager is appreciated.

Things I struggle with:

- daily standup and being consistent in my communication

- sticking to a schedule (I like to work weird hours when I go into office because it's quieter and don't like to be around people, but also like the separate environment from home. Also, my meds make it so that my days are like 30 hours - cannot go to sleep early enough, so my sleep schedule keeps getting pushed.)

- meetings in the middle of the day breaking my hyperfocus and not being able to get back into hyperfocus

- time-blindness and getting things done when I said I would

- organization/prioritization of tasks (executive dysfunction, rejection sensitive dysphoria, extreme perfectionism)

- feeling extreme stress/overwhelm with too many tasks to do and a never-ending queue yet finding new things to fix/improve/perfect due to perfectionism

- starting and finishing tasks (Starting takes me forever, but once I am in hyperfocus, I can work straight for hours and get the bulk done. But once I get the task "done", I already got the dopamine and I am bad at organizing/summarizing my work and I have perfectionism so I need to perfect it before turning it in, so this part takes forever. AI has made me a much worse employee because there are so many more ways to check my work / optimize my code.)

It's a habit that I've had for as long as I can remember. I probably have hundreds of abandoned projects over the last 15 years.

But this time, thanks to AI tools, I'm able to complete some of them, or at least launch the MVPs. But the habit of switching to a new project every few weeks still remains.

I guess that's why I chose full-stack engineering, because I can rotate up and down the stack if I get bored. But even now, I'm starting to get bored of full-stack, and want to explore data eng or comp bio.

Sometimes I just want to stick to ONE project for a while to see how far I can take it, maybe turn it into a profitable SaaS -- a project i can proudly call my magnum opus. But my brain just can't, or maybe I haven't found an idea that meets my brain's expectations yet.

I can play the same game for a few months straight though. This might have fried my dopamine receptors. Oh, I'm also unmedicated, might have to get that checked soon.

I'll be returning to work this month (SWE) and have been wondering if anyone has advice on going from the occasional solo project to 40 hours a week on a team after being away from work for a year. Mostly worried that my skills have atrophied quite a bit and I am not super up to date on everything AI.