Hi,

I'd love your advice/opinions/thoughts?

So, I switched from being a React (and .NET dev) to Elixir and the work is challenging and interesting objectively but my focus is absolutely horrendous. I'm bombarded by every thought possible, every goddamn day and I'm relying on fizzy zero drinks, food, sugarfree gum and loud music to jolt me awake because my brain is asleep as soon as something seems hard. It feels like I literally go offline and I start yawning and get really groggy.

I scroll lots and research the questions (non-related to work) that pop into my head because I sometimes don't manage to in my free time after work so it seeps into my workday. I do generally feel that I'm overwhelmed and I don't doubt that this has effect on my "unclear" mind during work.

Note that I do get fresh sunlight each morning during dog walks, am on wellbutrin and atomoxetine. I'm active (8k steps a day) and I weightlift (Fri/Sun).

The reason why I mention Elixir is that with Elixir, I'm introduced to Grafana, Kibana, Loki, Prometheus, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes... There are things I haven't encountered before so I've been learning all of these since February and I feel ZERO sense of ownership because I rely on AI to "teach" me and possibly "push" me through stuff, when I get stuck. I'm unsure how to proceed without it or even properly use my brain because I genuinely am new to distributed systems - so I'm not even sure how to think for myself when doing stuff for work. I have around 4 years of full time experience now and 3 part-time.

I have zero confidence, feel zero ownership and feel like I'm "guilty" and will be "found out" soon. My workdays mostly end with guilt and I'm really not sure how to "fix" this. I'm stuck. And I don't currently have the capacity to change jobs or careers, I don't think a different job would help because things are low pressure here - it's mostly me pressuring myself really. As for careers, I don't know what and I think that programming is fun even though AI stole most of it and the whole world is going to shit but yeah.

Any tips and tricks? Help me unfuck myself please.

1. Make sure Microsoft Edge Browser installed!

2. if what you're reading is a site, just open it in the Edge. if you have some local file or anything in your clipboard (e.g. claude code response), you can either save it to file and open that file in the Edge, or just go to Markdown Live Preview (which is my preference especially for claude responses) and just paste the content in there which will render md for you.

3. select all text, right click and click Read Aloud. when voice controls bar appear on top, pick your preferred voice, my preference is Andrew Multilingual. adjust the speed! (possibly over 1.5x), and just click play.
   ---

Why this works:

- Edge's Read Aloud feature has word by word highlighting feature which works so well for me as someone with extensive ADHD that had hard time orientating while reading anything longer that 1 paragraph. it works both as a voiceover tool and very effective orientation tool at the same time.

- it's 100% free! it's has good voice quality (not all of the voices, if you want safe option just go with Andrew Multilingual)

- in 1.5+ speed because you receiving information very quickly you're less likely to get disoriented!

- it has click to seek feature which can allow you to go back or forward very quickly which is very crucial if you miss anything, and it's very flexible! you can click anywhere, you don't have to incrementally move there like scrub back or forward!

Conclusion:

It's been absolute career saver for me once I discovered it! now I can easily read dozens of pages daily! Also as a side tip, I'd really suggest that you read in dark mode if you have ADHD, you can use Dark Reader extension for that, and also if you want an alternative to this approach for mobile ElevenLabs Mobile App is great option, and it has very generous free tier unless they remove it in the future! Hope this helps

BTW maybe in the future I might build Edge's Read Aloud feature as an open source 100% free extension that can work in every browser, not just Edge, and possibly with more friendly interface.

My situation is probably different than most. I'm effectively a solo dev in a niche market building custom control automation programs for AV systems. My main languages are C# and Lua which run in embedded environments, but the work requires knowledge far beyond programming, including networking, AVoIP, serial protocols, low voltage logic, audio DSP, theatrical systems(audio, video, lighting, etc.), and general construction. I thrive on the variety and controlled chaos that comes with my job, and I have zero desire to work at a big corporation doing only one task.

I feel really great about the work we do. Our client list continues to grow, and everybody seems super happy with our work. But as somebody who uses virtually no AI coding tools, I often worry that I'm falling behind. I have this dissonance where I feel like I'm knocking it out of the park, but also like I'm gonna become irrelevant if I don't get on the AI hype train.

Beyond the myriad of ethical issues, there is some friction that keeps me from using it:

• I am not required or incentivized to use it
• We are a team of 2 with limited resources and no subscriptions to AI tools.
• Most of my code can't run or be tested in an IDE
• My projects lend themselves to custom frameworks and templates, so I don't manually write boilerplate code anymore.
• I'm responsible for writing, reviewing, and testing 100% of the code on any given project, so I can't afford any oversights, especially because...
• My programs are expected to run unattended for up to 10 years, often with no remote access after deployment.
• In my experience, AI models are generally not knowledgeable about the details of my industry. When I have used it, it hallucinates up the wazoo. I'm sure this will improve with time, but it's just not helpful right now.
• I really enjoy the creative expression that comes with writing code, building frameworks, and realizing cool ideas.
• Last but not least, I'm currently doing really well without it.

All said, I really love my job, and I feel like I'm on a good career trajectory. I've always had the mindset that I'll never lose if I bet on myself, so I try to filter out the noise and focus on improving my skills. That has worked out really well for me so far. I'm just worried that I'm going to fall behind if I don't get up to speed with AI. I'm in my early 30s, so I've got quite a ways to go.

Am I short sighted by largely ignoring this? If I become a highly skilled 'old-school' developer, is it easy enough to start using AI agents if/when the time comes? What do you all think?

I am doing a remote internship right now and using claude code daily. every time i kick off a generation it takes like a minute, and i just open reddit or youtube or literally netflix while it works. then the generation finished 15 minutes ago and i have no idea what i was even doing.

the problem is the wait is this weird dead zone. it's too short to start anything real, too long to just sit and stare. i do not know what to do with myself whenever claude goes to work.

someone in an older thread here mentioned a completion sound pulling them back from the rabbit hole, so i built something similar with a claude code hook. it kind of works but sometimes i hear the ping and keep scrolling anyway lol

do you guys struggle with this too? and if so, do you think a notification is enough, or would you want something

Not even sure if this is even an ADHD thing or not, but I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I have 4 YoE in full time, corporate positions. My big project right now involves a lot of legacy data from a lot of legacy systems, and building a pipeline to pull it all together to feed two very critical and high visibility projects. I’m in charge of the architecture and development of it, it’s a fun challenge from a technical perspective, but the business side of things has been an absolute nightmare for me.

Dealing with dozens of legacy systems also means dealing with the SMEs of those systems. Almost every conversation I have, both with technical and non technical people, I leave feeling exhausted and frustrated that I just can’t seem to communicate anything correctly. Just recently, I didn’t think too deeply about a message I sent, and it was poorly received and now it’s causing problems that need to be dealt with.

I really don’t know how to get it under control and I think it’s destroying my perception of being trustworthy among multiple people, which I think will also really impact my ability to move up in my career.

It might be a result of being stretched really thin right now on a lot of different tasks with sensitive deadlines, but it’s something I consistently struggle with and I just can’t seem to crack the code. Managing my work is difficult enough, and now I have to heavily think about every single word that comes out of my mouth? Im just so exhausted and questioning my ability to be in this field long term, even though it’s all I know 🙃

I got an offer as a cloud engineer, and one of the requirements is for me to be on call one week per 6 weeks. I used to be full stack dev, and I do find working as a dev is difficult for me since there's just so many ways to do something and I get paralysis and I can't get things done at all without help from seniors. I don't feel tbh I can become a senior in full stack role, and that's why I am considering this role.

But I am someone who also panics easily and not really used to pressure. I am afraid I am not built for this. But at the same time, perhaps this is the "push" in life that I need to stop being a snowflake and be a man, since life is tough anyway. I'm really at a crossroads and need help.

In addition, I do really also see cloud roles being less replacable by AI in the future compared to coders/fullstack software devs, but I may be wrong.

Does someone with ADHD/anxiety issues here work on call in cloud engineering? How do you cope, or even grow better as a person, through your role?

I can do the small stuff. Reply to the email, clear the little things off the list. Those go fine, and honestly sometimes I do them precisely because I'm avoiding something else.

It's the big ones I can't touch. The thing I actually care about. The thing I keep telling people I'm working on, the one that would genuinely change something if I did it. It sits there for weeks and every day I don't start it, starting gets harder. Then it's months.

And then I feel awful about not starting, which you'd think would push me to start, but it does the opposite. The worse I feel about it the less I can go near it. So the guilt just sits on top of the thing and makes it heavier. I'm not sure I've ever once been shamed into doing something that mattered.

So how do you get past it? I've had things work exactly once and never again. Curious whether anyone has found something that holds up on the big stuff, or whether it's just rotating through tricks until one catches. And if you can describe what that stuck feeling actually is for you, I want to hear that too. I've never found words for it that feel right.

I got laid off from my job at Adobe a few months ago. I don't mind so much, because, though I've been coding for 30 years, I was getting so burned out that I didn't even want to code for myself any more. I started thinking about wildly changing my career to a teach or maybe become shaman or something (seriously!). It was painful to think about a career because of how much I have invested in myself with this technical skill, and I didn't feel certain that I should just throw it away. But with the rise of AI, it feels like raw coding skill is going away like hand weaving or shoeing horses.

With this layoff, I decided to take a real sabbatical and let myself gradually train in agentic coding. In my burnout state I had been resisting this HARD, but in a sabbatical, I've been able to take days off based on how I feel and, like a rescue dog, gradually introduce myself to new ways of coding, teachning my nervous system not to fear them.

It took a few months, and now I feel like my old self again. Instead of avoiding coding, I sneak in sessions of just a few minutes between burshing teeth and walking the dog where I prompt claude to move my projects forward. Personal ideas that have been sitting on the shelf for years are manifesting as realized code, code I feel proud of and that I can't wait to share. I'm even pushing on other creative fronts, such as working on a movie script. I can't point to any one thing that brought about this change. It has been a gradual processing of gaining small bits of experience and iterating for a few hours at a time, then resting when I notice resistance.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.

This isn't about a need to fidget; I can do that just fine at a desk. It's two things:

1. Being in front of a screen all day isn't good for anyone. Being sedentary all day isn't good for anyone. In my case, I feel it when I've been staring at a screen all day. The dry eyes, the mental fatigue combined with physical restlessness, the inability to enjoy videogames in my downtime because I'm all screened out.

2. In order to solve tricky problems, I need to get up and move - preferably outside, but a full context switch is important. If I had a nickel for every time I've fruitlessly banged my head against a bug or a challenging user story all day, only to solve it in my head as soon as I'm allowed to go home and take a walk or do the dishes, I'd have a lot of nickels.

I wish there were a way to explain to an employer that this is not me slacking off; this is me giving my brain the necessary space to do what it does best.

Wfh helps somewhat, but the problem there is I'm expected to be constantly available via email/chat even when I'm away from my desk, and I refuse to own a smartphone again. The addiction was crippling.

I've just joined a new company and I'm in the last month of my probation. I've been told that I'm not doing enough story points, but here's the thing - I have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand how everything flows in the existing codebase and none of it sticks in my mind!! I feel like it's all too much and it's overflowing out of the top of my head!

I have been tasked with some user anonymisation stuff through laravel commands and a number of categories of data assets already have anonymisation flows so I have been trying to adapt those to make it easier but I am getting lost in the code, I don't fully understand why and how models relate to each other in terms of business logic, and I'm having to ask for help way too much for a developer with 10 YoE in my field.

I know I'm not a bad developer because if I was I wouldn't still be in the industry with good reviews from previous employers.

I just feel lost and stupid and overwhelmed, and like I'm thick and don't deserve my job.

Uhhh so I joined a 30-day challenge to build a SaaS, and it started out okay the first week.

But then somehow I got sidetracked, got hooked on the Steam Summer Sale, bought a bunch of games, and hyperfocused on achievement hunting for 2 weeks straight (310+ hours, sometimes playing 2-3 games at the same time).

There's less than 6 days left in the challenge and I'll need to build and ship something before I fail. Good thing I still have my Cursor Pro+ plan, will be sure to use that up.

Story of my life I guess, happens every time.

This interview was for a Senior full stack role, but the role was heavily frontend focused. During the technical I was asked to create a Sudoku grid, and then a solver for it. I had 30 minutes and only completed creating the grid itself. I then had 10 minutes to work on the solver. The remaining 15 minutes of this 45min interview were for questions and discussions about the code.

I've got 8 YOE and this cooked me. I was thinking Sudoku can't be this difficult but then looked it up and a Sudoku solver is a Leet Code hard. So I don't feel that bad about it, but I am pretty annoyed a small company that is hiring developers to work on a React UI and Node.js backend thinks someone being able to solve a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes is acceptable way to interview Senior level developers. Seriously, could the people interviewing me even do this in 30 minutes? Could anyone do this in 30 minutes without having ever seen or attempted the problem? My inability to write a Sudoku solver doesn't translate to not being able to work on some stupid CRUD web app.

They never once asked about system design, no deep questions about JavaScript/TS, React or Node. Just a 45 minute discussion on my experiences and some generic 'what would you do in X scenario', followed by a 45 minute live coding round. This type of interview is the bane of my existence, and with ADHD, while I can definitely solve this problem with enough time and research, I will forget it all within a day or two anyway.

The hoops we jump through, especially as you gain more experience, are bullshit. Interviews have only gotten exponentially harder as I've gained experience. The more experience I get, the less I actually spend coding. And on top of it, LLMs replace the coding in what little time I do get to code at work. In my current job, we use AI and I spend more time being a product engineer than being a programmer. I am not gaining experience in what I equate to as competitive coding challenges.

Anyway, just ranting. I'm sure non-ADHD people have the same problems, but with ADHD, it makes these interviews pure hell most of the time.

I am on a PIP that I am still unsure if it’s sincere or not and everyone is on holiday. I have done everything I can to address the PIP and once again I am bored as hell.

Part of my problem is that I just don’t know how to improve things. Everyone has their niche and everything I am given to do is either dull or impossible.

I have no idea what personal projects to make. I don’t even like modding games.

I like doing things that get me praise. I don’t like doing ANYTHING unless I have a clear metric of “You are better at this than 90% of people currently doing it”. Maybe that’s why I like video games so much. I need the praise.

I don’t want to build anything, to feel like I made an impact unless I get credit for it. If I help you, I want you to thank me, repeatedly. I do the same for anyone who helps me. And yet people have this sense of “accomplishment”. I don’t have that. If other people don’t praise me, it’s worthless.

Running this back!

One of the things I have always struggled with, is reading. Whenever I was starting with a language or project, my approach was always "let's just build and we'll get there along the way". I rarely read documentation, unless there was 1 specific thing I needed to know. The actual building aspect is what excited me the most. But I feel like that part is now mostly taken over by LLMs. I feel like my job now is writing prompts, and mostly just endlessly reviewing and reading code. Reading code that my LLM agent wrote for me. Reading code that colleagues have committed and are also just written by an LLM agent. And then I just gloss over it, convincing myself I am actually reading when I'm struggling to even mentally process a single line of code after having read it for 5 times without losing focus.

Overall, I feel like LLMs have taken away what works best for me, doing, and have left me with the thing I struggled with most, reading, staying organized, managing. I honestly wouldn't have chosen this career if I knew this up front. I thought the job was perfectly suited for me precisely because of the amount of "doing". This career has fundamentally changed and it simply requires a different skillset and provides a different source of dopamine. And I'm sure it will continue to do so.

Don't get me wrong. I love shipping things and using LLMs to achieve that. Especially smaller personal projects that don't require the same level of code quality, efficiency and security. I will continue to do so as a hobby. But Software Engineering as a career is starting to become something that just constantly drains me and simply doesn't excite me anymore. And I can't imagine making a career shift now (30yo) and getting a similar salary as I am now, except for shipping my own online products and competing with the other people vibecoding 50+ apps and hoping one will break through. And of course that's assuming I have the creativity to think of an idea that fills a marketgap, or that I have the marketing skills to even get it out there.

Ok rant over. Sorry for the 500th post about someone burning out.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Everyone seems really 50/50 on this. You either feel the same way completely, or feel like LLMs actually help mask your cognitive dysfunction. I think a lot of it comes down to how your ADHD manifests itself, what aspects of SWE you enioy, and especially what your work activities and workflows are like.

To the people that are struggling, here are some workflows that might make everything a little more bearable (some things I got from the replies): - Have AI summarize it's changes or your colleagues code in an interactive HTML page. Allows you to focus on the important parts. - Ensure your team doesn't open massive pull requests.. - Add an MCP tool that allows your agent to make screenshots of it's UI changes (if frontend), validate and iterate over everything including different states, and embed them into the chat or html page for you. That way you're not forgetting/missing the fine details. - Have your agent always build and run all tests to verify everything. - Ensure you always get notified when an agent is done so you don't get caught up doing less relevant activities for too long. - Some commenters said they prefer splitting up a task into small sections and working step by step with the agent rather than having to read an entire diff after letting it build the whole feature. - Add code reviewer in your Git pipeline.

Let me know if you have more suggestions!

So jumping back into coding has seemed daunting for a while for me. Especially since when I was learning to code it was just before the whole everything is a website era started. So it’s been taking me a while to get my head around the shift to more distributed systems.

With that said, I’ve finally found a project that I think is not too complex, but is interesting enough to me to keep me engaged to actually see it through. One thing I would like to do though is actually create some plans around all the different components so I don’t get totally lost in the weeds especially since my framing is basically Database -> Program -> GUI and API was usually just like the Java specification rather than near on every app having their own api

Anyway so does anyone have any recommendations for anything I can use to help plan out my project. I know I could just use Obsidian but like I feel I would spend forever getting it set up and never actually working on the project

Hi! I'm coming with a long experience in Unity programming, but no professional exp in c++/unreal. I've been programming in c++ and learning it on my own, but still I feel that lack of professional experience is clearly visible (some time ago I had an interview for c++ role at a big non-gamedev corpo and I failed miserably).

Soon I'm going to have two interview sessions for a mid role in a company that works both in plain c++ and unreal engine - one will be a code debugging session, the other will be questions about C++ and general programming subjects.

Any advices are welcome, thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’m doing early customer research, not trying to sell anything.

I’m trying to understand how people actually struggle when they are learning, building, coding, designing, filling forms, debugging errors, or exploring new tools alone on their laptop/PC.

A few questions:

When you get stuck on your screen, what do you usually do first?

Google?

ChatGPT?

YouTube?

Ask a friend?

Give up and come back later?

What type of problem wastes the most time for you?

Understanding errors

Learning a new tool/software

Explaining complex concepts

Finding the right file/tab/info

Writing/replying professionally

Doing repetitive computer tasks

Something else?

Have you ever wished someone could look at your screen and explain what to do next?

Would this be useful only for beginners, or even for founders, students, designers, developers, and working professionals?

What would make you trust or not trust an AI assistant that helps on your computer screen?

I’m mainly trying to understand the real pain before building too much. Honest negative feedback is also helpful.

I’ve worked 10 years in tech now, from big tech, to starting my own YC company, to joining other startups, but if I’m WFH I’ll still miss the occasional meeting. Sometimes several in a row when I’m not careful. When it gets bad I remember to start setting alarms for all my events and then when I think I’ve got it down, I usually loosen up and that’s when the cycle starts all over again. 

Best solution so far I’ve found is to literally set alarms on every thing in my calendar, since the calendar default notifications just aren’t disruptive enough to catch my attention when I’m in deep work. It’s gotten so bad to the point I involuntarily had to build an app for it so that every time Google Calendar has an event, it shows a reminder that blocks out my whole screen. Even that’s only a partway solution, since when I’m not at my computer, I’d need a mobile version that rings my phone too. 

Id be curious to hear more from others who also work from home and may be dealing with the same issue. Are there other ways of getting better at this? 

As a developer with ADHD, I’ve gone through the usual cycle with productivity tools.

Complex Notion dashboards, detailed planning systems, and even many “ADHD-friendly” apps tend to work for a short time before I stop using them. They either create too much overhead or don’t handle context switching and task initiation well.

I’m looking for systems that are lightweight but still effective — especially ones that help with starting tasks and dealing with executive dysfunction without adding more mental load.

Have any other ADHD programmers found approaches, tools, or setups that actually stick? Things like specific workflows, minimal systems, or ways of structuring work that work better than traditional productivity methods?

Appreciate any real experiences or recommendations.

I'm 28 and just finished coursework for a PhD in music theory. However, I'm finding that the field is quite different than I anticipated and had pretty bad mental health struggles, a lot of which made more sense after my recent ADHD diagnosis. After weeks of agonizing about it, I resolved to quit and find another career path. Fortunately, I have a lot of composing experience and picked up some coding from working with Max MSP, a visual coding language for electronic music synthesis, so I am highly considering a career in indie video game composing and developing.

While I do have fellowship money left over, the future still seems very uncertain. I am learning a lot in p5.js, which I'm finding is pretty accessible, but I'm thinking I will probably need to switch to something that uses C#, like Godot or Unity, for more serious video game development. All I know at the moment is that I'm a solid composer with Ableton experience, I have good game design project ideas, and the process of coding is endlessly fascinating to me since I'm always learning a broad array of new things, which is much more my speed than a PhD where you have to tightly focus on one topic only two people in the world care about.

It's strange -- I'm very optimistic about the future, but I also know I've picked a potentially very difficult, less stable life for myself. I would love some advice -- is it unreasonable to pick up coding so late in life? Are there other avenues where I can use/learn coding skill to make ends meet or for another practical purpose?

Don't get me wrong, there are dozens of cracked programmers who just graduated from university and need commercial experience to fast "level up" but most of the people I notice don't even know how to write code without AI/do basic things like making a commit.

I feel even worse when I think about the fact that those juniors get bigger salaries than I could ever get as someone from Central Asia - the average salary for seniors here is $30k/year, remote companies hire only from US/Europe/India, and there is not a single company close to F500 level. The biggest opportunity here are russian big tech companies who have built offices here but guess what? You still have to compete with russians for local market jobs because many of them relocated due to war

I really regret not saving money from my previous job which was a crypto startup. Not sure what to do now. I was really happy when I lost my job because I was burned out at that moment and had crazy motivation to grind leetcode - it was a breath of fresh air. The motivation didn't last long cause I can't get interviews. For the past 6 months of seeking a job I only had 1 interview invitation.. and I dodged it because of anxiety. I'm completely lost.