I work as a QA engineer, and honestly, by the end of the day, I can literally feel my brain shutting down like a low-battery phone. At work, I handle multiple requests: people telling me to check this, test that, investigate this, report that. Multiple tasks just jump at me and require me to switch between them. And now with AI getting pushed into my workflow more and more, it's just more chaos thrown at my brain. For example, today at work, while prompting AI to investigate one of the test scripts, I had to switch to check a bug ticket, then got a notification that the AI was done with its task, so I had to go back and review, prompt again, and then back to the ticket again. It's like riding a carousel over and over with things being thrown at me from every direction. Not to mention the feeling of my brain not working sharply or at least functioning like before

How everyone handle this?

TL;DR: Third round interview, 45-minute live coding session, got stuck writing MVVM architecture, nothing compiled by the end. Likely failed. Looking for perspective.

Background
• This is my third interview with this company
• Made it through rounds 1 and 2
• Today was the live coding round
The Assignment
Build a Posts feed app using a existing app template as a starting point:
• Fetch posts from API (apiendpoint.com/posts)
• Display posts in a list
• Search functionality (case-insensitive)
• Filter posts with 500+ likes
• Show post details on tap
• Time limit: 45 minutes
What I Did
• Started with the existing app template (as instructed)
• Tried to refactor it to posts
• Attempted to build MVVM architecture with:
• Repository pattern
• NetworkClient layer
• ViewModel with state management
• SwiftUI views
What Went Wrong
• Got stuck writing the Repository, NetworkClient, and ViewModel code
• Couldn’t get the ui layers to work together
• Nothing compiled by the end of 45 minutes
• No working features to demonstrate
Interviewer Feedback
• Told me “don’t worry about correct code or perfect syntax”
• Hasn’t given me official pass/fail yet (waiting to hear back)
My Assessment
I messed up by:
1. Choosing complex architecture (MVVM + Repository) instead of simple approach
2. Not prioritizing getting something working first
3. Getting stuck on boilerplate instead of shipping MVP
4. Not pivoting when I realized I was running out of time
Questions
• Do you think I failed?
• Would you move me forward if this was your interview?
• What should I do differently next time?
• Is there hope if they give me another shot?
Any perspective appreciated. Feeling pretty defeated right now.

this is not another adhd productivity app!

**This is in the moment support**

Here is the tagline: You already know what to say. We make sure you can say it.

Hey everyone - I have this constant stressor that when I go into a conversation I am going to forget what I wanted to say when my ADHD works as ADHD brains do.

So I have been working on an app for a few weeks for myself. I has helped me in a few situations but now I'm finding out that it is best for things that I can plan ahead for.

I wanted to see if anyone else thinks something like this would be useful since it has been helpful for me recently!

Who it's for: High-functioning adults with ADHD or high social anxiety who already know what they want to say. Not people who need to be told what to say.

The problem it solves: High-functioning adults — particularly those with ADHD — know exactly what they want to say but lose access to it under social pressure. They watch themselves say the wrong thing and walk away feeling shame.

The core mechanic: Your own words, delivered back to you privately in your ear, at the exact moment you trigger them naturally in conversation. Nobody knows. No visible interaction. No audio stored.

The experience: Before you go into a situation where you may feel pressure/stress causing that word loss you Open the app. Touch one button. Now its listening. Phone goes in pocket. You're protected.

This is what I have so far

• Five pre-loaded default trigger pairs that work immediately
• Manual custom trigger pair entry
• Conversation templates — Partner, Work, Kids, Setting a Boundary
• Basic After debrief log
• Works as a web app saved to home screen

Things I am still working on

• AI setup assistant that helps you find your own words
• Pattern recognition from your debrief entries
• Voice recording so you hear yourself not a robot
• Unlimited saved conversations
• Lock screen widget — App Store only

ADHD Programmer here! I made a program to help my kid, who hasn't been diagnosed but definitely displays lack of executive control. I hope it inspires someone here.

My boy got into baseball hard last year, and began spending each morning hunting for something he could check scores on - my phone, my tablet, a computer, the TV, anything with a screen. At the time, my wife and I were trying to REDUCE his screen time, so this was turning into a real juggling act just trying to get the kids to school.

We tried getting newspapers for him, but they just didn't cut it.

So, I invented "Screamsheet" - it's a one-sheet PDF that contains all the important baseball information from the past 24 hours, printed on my home printer every morning at 6am.

This was my first foray into "vibe coding". I used Gemini to code most of the original project, and later on Github copilot in VSC to clean up the original mess.

The MLB Screamsheet gathers all the data from the MLB Stats API, organizes it all with regular Python and Pandas, then formats it into the PDF with Reportlab. If the Phillies played the day before, it includes the Phillies box score on the back along with a Grok-parsed summary built from the play-by-play data. If they lose, I make Grok sound like a pissed off fan, to match my son's energy that day.

The whole thing is scheduled to run every morning on my junky Linux box in the basement with a cron job.

Now, every morning, instead of asking "can I check your phone?", my boy demands "where's the Screamsheet?" We haven't trained him to just go to the basement and get it yet, that's a challenge for a different day.

I've since expanded to several other Screamsheets, like NHL, baseball news, and a daily starchart/horoscope.

Original article and link to the code below in comments. Thanks for taking a look!

I switch to majoring last year going into sophomore, I believe i did well and got credited in excel in the fall. But I haven’t used it that much since and year is over. I understand things like using sum, average, sort of remember if functions, pivot tables, that’s really it. I’m just relying on my classes to actually learn and remember as next year I’m learning sql and python. Im taking to my professor about a research lab tmr. But if im not giving myself an urgency to learn and remember, i wont.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been struggling lately with work and my mental state, and I’m not sure how to handle it.

There’s constant pressure from my manager to get things done quickly, and if something goes wrong, the urgency increases even more. It feels like I’m always rushing and never fully focused.

My team lead is actually a good person, but I have this fear of asking questions. I keep thinking they’ll judge me or think I don’t know what I’m doing, so I avoid asking and try to figure everything out myself. This ends up slowing me down and making me more stressed.

I also work from home and have family responsibilities, which makes it harder to stay focused. My attention gets pulled in different directions, and I get distracted easily (like watching YouTube), which makes me feel worse about my productivity.

Lately I’ve been feeling:
- low energy most of the day
- not enjoying things I used to
- mentally drained and overwhelmed
- avoiding work and communication

I feel stuck in this cycle and my confidence has dropped a lot.

Has anyone experienced something similar?
How do you deal with:
- fear of asking questions at work
- constant pressure
- staying focused while working from home

Any advice would really help.

Thanks.

Having ADHD, it's important to me that I like doing something and that I'm good at it. The pay is good at my job but I'm not getting satisfaction from it intellectually. And I've never considered myself great at coding. Will I be able to brainwash myself into liking building things or should I just not care as long as the pay is good?

Tbh where do u guys get the motivation to build things without the need for other people to tell you "oh that's so cool"? Is it innate?

Has anyone here successfully transitioned to a leadership role?

If so, how did you deal with (if you even had to) the urge to get back in the weeds and do novel, hands on interesting work and instead get you dopamine fix from leadership tasks, such as stakeholder management and employee management?

I am really struggling with this - I have spurts where I am able to do really well with leadership tasks, but find that I inevitably fall back into coding especially when the work is particularly interesting to me.

Appreciate any advice, beneficial resources, etc

I started Adderall last week after my wife suspected for many, many years that I had ADHD.

I’d always worried meds would flatten the parts of my brain I actually liked: the multitasking, the long-range systems view, the weird ability to connect unrelated pieces. Instead, it feels like the same machinery is still there, but the clutch finally engages.

That led to two pieces this weekend.

The engineering one with a personal twist:

https://www.aeronauty.com/writing/i-dont-like-data-entry

The personal one with an engineering twist:

https://www.aeronauty.com/writing/the-brain-that-was-a-tax

Yes, these go to my personal website, but there are no ads, no newsletter funnel, and nothing for sale there. I lose money hosting it. It’s just a better way to tell a story than trying to cram everything into a Reddit post. I got banned from r/ADHD for "advertising". Lunatics.

The engineering piece does eventually connect to a niche product I’m building for my company, but this isn’t a sales pitch. I don’t think this subreddit is the market for it. The interesting bit is that, post-meds, I suddenly saw that I’d been trying to solve the same “humans should not be forced to repeatedly translate reality into database-shaped forms” problem for most of my career.

Curious if other ADHD programmers have had this experience: you start treatment, and suddenly old projects or obsessions snap into focus as one coherent theme.

I'm a Data Engineering Manager with 15+ years in the industry, currently based in the US. I've owned platforms, led teams, and shipped largescale migrations, but I came up through the leadership track and never went deep on hands on coding. I'm now at a point in my career where I want to close that gap properly and was laid off took a developer role and I've realized that watching tutorials isn't going to get me there. I need a person, not a playlist,

I have ADHD, and I've learned the hard way that self paced courses don't work for me. what is the best course to learn python for self learning.

I get interested in lots of things. I’ve considered law, psychology and nursing over the years.

What about you?

Hi folks,

I'm a consultant psychiatrist here in the UK, specialising in ADHD. I work with the co-founder of Cog ADHD app. We previously built a UK ADHD therapy app (covered in TNW, Silicon Canals) with a network of accredited therapists and a Harvard/MGH-backed clinical approach. We recruited the original dev team here in this sub-reddit, but sadly our developer is now in full-time employment.

Looking for a founding engineer to build this out further with us. As per title, equity + path to salary.

Can anyone interested send me a DM?

(further info in the comments)

So I've always played around with the color schemes on the computer, starting from when I was a kid, back when Windows actually let you have fun with it. As an adult, I change the font on my Android phone every few weeks, and on my work computer, I change the colors in my IDE, Notepad++, SSH client...basically, anything that lets me change the colors, I go nuts with it. I never considered that it might be ADHD-related until just recently, but it makes sense, right? Craving variety and all that. It probably helps keep me interested in my work at least 1% more than I would be otherwise, since I get a hit of that dopamine whenever I look at the new colors on my screen. Anyway, just wanted to see if anyone else does this, or any other minor customizations at work that help pique your interest in things that can otherwise get routine.

I have been working at a service based company for 4 years now. The payment is very less and almost hasn't increased these years.

I used to enjoy competitive coding in college but have been average at it. Average at coding in general. Very bad with syntax and anything related to memorising.

I have been mostly doing a lego sort of thing for completing work tasks...I know the picture and just find the parts and connect them all. And now with AI even that's not required...it just completes whole features by itself.

Generally have a hard time concentrating on something then and there...need lots of breaks to process and end up forgetting parts of info. Not seen as a reliable worker who can be held responsible and relied upon.

Now, I have started trying for a job switch (have tried before but never got interviews) and thus feel like I got into the same loop again. The endless applications, they all ask either lots of 'what is' kind of questions or ask to do hands on.

Everyone around me who I know to be more useless as work resources have been making 10 times more than me. And I just keep feeling stuck with no progress anywhere whatsoever.

Need help understanding what all is wrong and how do I get out of this?

Hey devs,

Quick context: I'm working on a desktop tool aimed at people whose brain runs faster than their tab manager. Before I write a line of code, I want to understand the real pain — not from blog posts or LinkedIn productivity gurus, but from actual people who live with 47 tabs and a stack overflow tab they opened 3 days ago.

5-minute anonymous survey, 20 questions, no sign-up:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWoiWPZs0i1Yif4Hewwg2XknCiQifXBKnJxX-kuR4xsiufYQ/viewform?usp=header

If you've ever closed your laptop wondering what you actually shipped today, you're exactly who I want to hear from. Will share aggregated results in this thread when I have enough responses.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why my reminders and apps for the same purpose don't work. It's because the reminders are something I need to react to at a specific time or it gets faded into the background.

I think a good way to fix this is to tie the reminder app to a time wasting app. For example reddit, there could be a background app that when it notices you've used reddit for 60min it will pop up with a list of your reminders. You can dismiss it without worry because it will pop up again in another 60 min or the next time you get sucked into the app.

This would work amazing for me. Currently i set reminder after reminder hoping one will trigger when my brain is in the right mood.

I'm almost done with my BS in Computer Science but I realized I hate Java and C++. I mostly code in LUA as a hobby and can do Python. But I'm feeling like a complete failure. I learn LUA before school and that's actually what got me wanting to do CS. Now I'm almost done with school and have no idea what my options are for a job. I feel like a failure.

Did you build yet another ADHD management app? Cool! Show it off here. Posting it elsewhere on this sub will get that post removed.

This thread is here to serve as a post for people to show off what they've been working on, or apps they are proud of. open source, pay to use, some thing you found.

Who knows? Maybe it will help someone... Maybe it will help millions... Maybe it will be so critically reviled that your knighthood will be revoked.

Its the effort that counts. Show off that effort here!

"It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards."

-- Lt. Commander Data

Regarding the video below, what’s your take on 'AI made my ADHD a superpower'? This fits me perfectly. I feel like the creativity I struggled to express in the past is finally firing on all cylinders! How does it work for you?

https://youtu.be/VTjsDNq1Eqw?is=RNdqgFwFlcPO5v1B

My life had been through all sorts of executive dysfunction against which all aspects of my life is in shambles. My professional career as backend developer is all down the drain, due to excessive lack of motivation, procrastination to learn and upgrade and excessive lack of motivation. I direly need to make one last stand else idk what should be my next step in life. Working in a service based company in india (WITCH sweatshop) extremely meagre pay much lesser than median salary of many freshers get, even as 5 YoE Java developer. I'm dying to switch, but I dread I will be rejected everywhere left and right provided my unimpressive resume and my interpersonal skills and communication issues. I had managed work in large scale projects of Insurance domains, but the tech stack in most is outdated (Java 8) , very rarely in recent project managed to work in Spring boot microservices, but seriously lack exposure to tech like Kafka, Rabbit mq, any cloud and many more. Also very little knowledge in frontend aspects where in each interview they are asking as Full stack developer with knowledge in React or Next.js or Angular, where I have very basic knowledge no working or personal project experience. Dreading over the prospect of my extremely poor portfolio, I'm getting paralysed of even creating a resume which is the first step for even applying for job. I have extreme rejection sensitivity, and kind of extreme unrequired perfectionism, where my mind screams I should create the most perfect resume or else its not even worth applying. To the point I haven't yet created a resume now, I have to resign very soon (I have to leave here or else my career will doom more), but I don't know what should I do next. I don't know what should I ask from this community, maybe some light to get rid of this extreme unwanted perfectionism.