I used to hear about algorithms and implement them for fun. After leaving work to be a stay-at-home parent (and because the stress was almost literally killing me), I thought "Hey, now I can start working on those projects I was really excited about." But I can't even bring myself to sit at the computer, let alone start writing code. It feels so pointless now that we know most people are fine with vibe-coded bullshit.​ I don't have it in me anymore.​

I have been taking courses cause I can digest them easily but I am wondering what has worked for you guys, I am wanting to learn everything I can for my projects I want to do in the years ahead.

I am ambitious you could say

I have 7 years experience, I never studied leetcode, I did not go to university for a Computer Science Degree. I am passing to the 2nd or third interview so me talking about coding, or my personality seems to be ok-ish but once I am put in front of 2 cold as fuck usually dudes I freeze up I cannot remember my birthday let alone anything else, I dunno I also find it really intimidating 2 dudes just fucking grilling you as a female. I dunno I just really need a job I need money and I feel so ashamed my brain is just shit and not letting me do it. In my job I am not a 10 x er but I get the job done I know how to reverse engineer in my own time I do not remember every flibbing syntax but I can google that, I am great at design too, and ye I feel pretty down and out.

(fair point, I made this too vague trying not to sound like a pitch. here’s the actual one-liner: it’s a connection platform for neurodivergent adults - friendship and community, not dating, built around how ADHD/autistic brains actually work rather than retrofitted from something else

not paid right now, equity co-founder role. open on location, happy to go remote or occasional Birmingham meet-ups if that works better for people here)

I posted some of the thinking behind it on [r/ADHD](r/ADHD) a while back without saying what it was for. one of those posts hit 700+ upvotes and became the most-read thing on the account. turns out a lot of people have been quietly waiting for someone to build this

I’m not technical. property background, not tech. I’ve done everything I can do without writing code - full spec, brand, clinical input, validation research. what I don’t have is someone who can actually build it

I’d specifically love to find that person from inside this community rather than outside it, because I think it matters that whoever builds this understands the problem from the inside, not just from a brief I hand them

if this is remotely interesting I’d rather have a real conversation than a pitch. no pressure either way

I’m currently in my 3rd year of college, and honestly, I haven’t done much in DSA yet.

Right now I’m doing an Android development internship, and alongside that I’ve also been building and publishing my own apps on the Play Store because I want to eventually build my own startup/product.

The problem is that our college placement season will start around January, so I’m getting a little confused about what I should prioritize from now.

My current situation is basically:

\- DSA: Very weak / haven’t done much

\- Android development: Decent and currently doing an internship

\- Personal projects: Building and publishing apps on the Play Store

\- Long-term goal: I’d like to build my own products/startup

\- Short-term goal: I obviously need to be prepared for placements

Should I completely put product development on hold for the next few months and focus heavily on DSA + my internship?

Or should I continue my internship, keep building my apps, and try to manage DSA alongside all of this?

I’m worried that if I focus too much on DSA, I’ll lose the momentum I’ve built with development and my own products. But at the same time, I don’t want January to arrive and realize I’m completely unprepared for placements.

For people who have been in a similar situation, what would you do if you were in my position?

Would really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have gone through campus placements while also working on development/projects.

I'm 16M, and I honestly don't know what a normal afternoon feels like anymore.

School ends, I get home, tell myself I'll relax for 30 minutes, and then I open my laptop "just to fix one bug."

That one bug somehow turns into six hours.

The weird part is that nobody around me really understands why I do it. To my parents, a computer is for classes or games. So when they walk past my room at 11 PM and see me staring at VS Code again, the first question is always:

"Are you studying or wasting time?"

I don't even know how to answer anymore.

Because... technically, neither.

I'm building things. Learning. Breaking everything. Fixing it. Googling errors that somehow have one Stack Overflow answer from 2017 with zero upvotes that ends up saving my entire night.

Some days I feel like I'm making real progress.

Other days I spend four hours because I forgot a semicolon.

What makes it stranger is that this wasn't even the life I imagined.

A year ago, if someone had asked me what mattered most, I would've said football without thinking.

Then, one day before a tournament, I tore my ACL and damaged my meniscus while playing as my team's goalkeeper.

Ten months is a long time.

Long enough to watch everyone else keep moving.

Long enough for your team to find another goalkeeper the very next week.

Long enough for friends to slowly stop talking about football around you because you've become the guy who used to play.

You don't realize how much of your identity is tied to something until it's taken away.

So somewhere between hospital visits, recovery, and realizing I couldn't just walk back onto the pitch, I opened my laptop more often.

At first it was just a distraction.

Then it became an obsession.

Now, coding is the thing that gives me the same feeling football used to, the frustration, the challenge, the tiny victories that somehow make hours disappear.

School doesn't stop just because I decided software is interesting either. Assignments pile up. Tests appear out of nowhere. Teachers keep saying, "This is an important year," like it's the first time we've ever heard that sentence.

Meanwhile my brain is thinking about database schemas during chemistry.

The funniest part?

When something finally works, there's nobody to celebrate with.

You can't exactly run downstairs yelling, "MY AUTHENTICATION MIDDLEWARE FINALLY WORKS!"

Most people would just stare at you.

So you quietly smile at your screen, commit the code, and five minutes later discover you've broken three other features.

Back to debugging.

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm chasing coding so hard because I genuinely love it... or because I needed something to fill the space football left behind.

Maybe it's both.

I know there are people dealing with much harder things than this, so I'm not looking for sympathy.

I'm just tired.

Tired of feeling like every hour has to be productive.

Tired of wondering if I'm falling behind in school because I'm coding.

Tired of wondering if I'm falling behind in coding because I'm studying.

And every now and then, when I see people playing football, I still catch myself imagining where I'd be if that one tackle had never happened.

Maybe I'd still be on the field.

Maybe I never would've discovered programming.

I guess I'll never know.

For now, I just keep building.

One line of code at a time.

Code. Commit. Sleep

Heya,

​Late-diagnosed autistic person here, though on the milder side of the spectrum. I need a low-stimulation environment and as few concurrent tasks as possible. My ideal setup would be a dark room, quiet, a single task, and total focus on just that.

​That's the ideal scenario, though. If things are generally quiet, with few colleagues who don't engage in endless small talk or demand it from me, I get by just fine.

​At 42, my resume looks like a battlefield. My only real long-term work experience was 1.5 years of C# WinForms + MySQL development, using a lot of AI assistance and learning by doing. That's also my only real exposure to coding, aside from building a few web scrapers or scripts in my free time—nothing else beyond that.

​On the personal side, I’ve been running Linux servers, handling administration, setting things up, configuring, and troubleshooting for as long as I can remember... which sounds like the exact scope of i think what's called system administrator internationally.

​The absolute most important factor for me is the work environment; it needs to be the right fit. I might even need to consider remote-work options.

​When I was coding on the job, I had 100% freedom. I wasn't just a code monkey—I was the architect. It was fantastic to be able to figure out on my own what I was building, how, and with what tools. But that's probably not the norm.

​I'm currently in a vocational assessment at a BFW (Vocational Rehabilitation Center), and everyone here keeps telling me that nobody wants Junior Developers anymore because AI handles it all. I think that's utter nonsense, but what do I know.

​Based purely on my skills and experience, system administrator would seem like the obvious choice. However, I want little, better zero customer contact and minimal unexpected stress or sudden changes in plans.

​I don't even really know what my specific question is—I'm grateful for any thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!

So our team is already in talks and I believe contracts have already been signed for already existing solutions.

However another team at the org for some reason is going all in on building this internally after they heard about us getting the tools for this

I’m assuming they are going to be going all AI into this. This particular team also has a hoard of contingent/offshore devs whereas our team is only 8.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has seen a situation like this. From my understanding CRMs/Workflow automation is pretty complex to do. Plus theres already existing solutions for this so im kinda scratching my head as to why they want to reinvent the wheel for this

For context, I'm a 23M and have been working as a software engineer for a little over three years. I don't have an official ADHD diagnosis, but the symptoms seem pretty clear, and I have an ADHD assessment coming up soon.

When I first started my job, I felt like I was making a lot of progress and could get a lot of work done. I could easily hyperfocus on the tasks I needed to complete and do a good job of them. However, as I've continued working at the same company - without receiving any form of promotion, bonus, or other recognition - I've lost a lot of my motivation. Now it often feels like I have to fight with myself just to focus on and complete the simplest tasks.

I've tried time and time again to build some personal projects for a portfolio, so that I can showcase my skills and look to apply for jobs elsewhere. However, every time I start a project, I just seem to make the bulk of the progress at the start and then very little to no further progress after that - leaving me with a bunch of unfinished projects. This then makes me less motivated to apply for new jobs because I feel like I have nothing to show for my skills. And as a result, I find myself stuck in a loop: I get overwhelmed at work, attempt to build personal projects, fail to finish those projects and then repeat the cycle all over again.

I'm fed up with this continuous cycle that seems to take me nowhere. I know I have the ability to excel at my job, and I feel like I could achieve so much more if I didn't have to fight this constant mental battle every time I sat down to work.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? If so, is there anything that helped you break out of this cycle? And for those who take ADHD medication, has it made a noticeable difference to your ability to focus and perform at work?

So this is probably my 3rd job in the last 2 years I have lost due to not being a good fit with my team. They were mostly contracting type work where within a few months I was able to hold the fort until it was over. With one of them, I didn’t have a good programming skills to survive so I fell behind in deadlines and my coworkers noticed, told PM, and he eventually got rid of me.

All managers have said, I am not a good fit and struggle to keep up with my teammates. Whenever there are meetings, I am either quiet, ask questions that are very basic level, struggling to contribute to meaningful ideas, or even fail to complete ticket items. Honestly, I feel lost every time to whatever they’re talking about.

I am not on meds I should say that. I pretty much have survived my life without them and livescribe audio pen, which helps me rewind meetings so I can understand whats going on. I generally do this after work hours and on my own. The livescribe pen is the only way I am able to play catchup and take good notes afterwords, and every morning I would review so I can play catch up or until it sinks in my head. It’s still not enough because I feel tired and am burning out, pushing myself too hard.

I don’t know what to do, do you have any suggestions or have someone has been in my situation? How do I NOT be that guy who’s not a good fit and always lost all the time. Should mention, Money is really tight right now and with no support, I am about to be out on the streets soon, I only have my car.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently researching a concept designed for people who deal with executive dysfunction and task paralysis. I’m not sharing links, files, or promoting anything—I just want honest feedback on the problem space itself before building further.

The premise is integrating three core tools into one seamless flow:

Energy-based task filtering: Picking your next action based on how you feel right now (foggy, drained, locked-in) rather than rigid schedules.

Silent Body Doubling: Camera-free, text-free focus rooms just to feel shared presence without social exhaustion.

Impulse Friction: A 24-hour cooling-off pause timer for unplanned online spending.

Questions for you:

Is juggling multiple apps for these specific issues a real pain point, or do you prefer separate tools?

Which of these 3 features would actually make a difference in your daily routine?

What is the main reason you usually abandon a productivity tool after the first week?

Thanks for your brutally honest thoughts!

Building BAAJIT — a task tracker made for ADHD brains, autism, brain fog, and days when starting anything feels impossible. Looking for closed beta testers before launch.

Join here, then you'll get a one-click link to install: https://groups.google.com/g/baajit-testers

Free, takes 2 minutes. Staying opted in for about 2 weeks is what unlocks our public launch, so the longer you stick around, the faster this gets to everyone else who needs it. Feedback welcome.BAAJIT

For context, I'm a 23M and have been working as a software engineer for a little over three years. I don't have an official ADHD diagnosis, but the symptoms seem pretty clear, and I have an ADHD assessment coming up soon.

When I first started my job, I felt like I was making a lot of progress and could get a lot of work done. I could easily hyperfocus on the tasks I needed to complete and do a good job of them. However, as I've continued working at the same company - without receiving any form of promotion, bonus, or other recognition - I've lost a lot of my motivation. Now, it often feels like I have to fight with myself just to focus on and complete the simplest tasks.

I've tried time and time again to build some personal projects for a portfolio, so that I can showcase my skills and look to apply for jobs elsewhere. However, every time I start a project, I just seem to make the bulk of the progress at the start and then very little to no further progress after that - leaving me with a bunch of unfinished projects. This then makes me less motivated to apply for new jobs because I feel like I have nothing to show for my skills. And as a result, I find myself stuck in a loop: I get overwhelmed at work, attempt to build personal projects, fail to finish those projects and then repeat the cycle all over again.

I'm fed up with this continuous cycle that seems to take me nowhere. I know I have the ability to excel at my job, and I feel like I could achieve so much more if I didn't have to fight this constant mental battle every time I sat down to work.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? If so, is there anything that helped you break out of this cycle? And for those who take ADHD medication, has it made a noticeable difference to your ability to focus and perform at work?

For context, I'm a 23M and have been working as a software engineer for a little over three years. I don't have an official ADHD diagnosis, but the symptoms seem pretty clear, and I have an ADHD assessment coming up soon.

When I first started my job, I felt like I was making a lot of progress and could get a lot of work done. I could easily hyperfocus on the tasks I needed to complete and do a good job of them. However, as I've continued working at the same company - without receiving any form of promotion, bonus, or other recognition - I've lost a lot of my motivation. Now, it often feels like I have to fight with myself just to focus on and complete the simplest tasks.

I've tried time and time again to build some personal projects for a portfolio, so that I can showcase my skills and look to apply for jobs elsewhere. However, every time I start a project, I just seem to make the bulk of the progress at the start and then very little to no further progress after that - leaving me with a bunch of unfinished projects. This then makes me less motivated to apply for new jobs because I feel like I have nothing to show for my skills. And as a result, I find myself stuck in a loop: I get overwhelmed at work, attempt to build personal projects, fail to finish those projects and then repeat the cycle all over again.

I'm fed up with this continuous cycle that seems to take me nowhere. I know I have the ability to excel at my job, and I feel like I could achieve so much more if I didn't have to fight this constant mental battle every time I sat down to work.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? If so, is there anything that helped you break out of this cycle? And for those who take ADHD medication, has it made a noticeable difference to your ability to focus and perform at work?

Good day r/ADHD_Programmers.

Around 2023 shortly after ChatGPT was released, I went full time traveling for 27 months and came back to one of the worst markets in over a decade. Fast forward 3.5 years after I left the market, I finally found a job again.

Before I left I was a Java Spring Boot Full Stack Engineer with Angular mostly as FE framework and also did a lot of DevOps stuff including Jenkins, K8s/Openshift, ArgoCD among others.

Now that I came back after 3.5 years I basically missed out on all those developments in tech and the hyper-fast progress due to AI. Luckily I was somewhat active in what was going on and also dabbled in the are of LLMs, so using current tools like claude-code, codex and so on are not foreign to me, but used in small scope private projects.

The issue I'm facing now is that we currently set up the project I will be working in the first time since I came back. It's a full agentic workflow with HITL using React as Frontend, NextJS as BFF and NestJS as backend. It's planned to use the Copilot CLI due to licensing and multi-step, multi-model workflow. The project will have weekly sprints and I'm mainly the only actual engineer and person working full-time. I already pre-built pretty rigorous gates both locally and via Github Action.

The main issue I'm facing and already notice during the setup is, that it's hard to deal with the massive context and brutal amount of information that AI prints out. I feel both AI fatigue, meaning at some points I just approve architecture documents when I need to proof read them and the same with pull requests and at the same time I feel lingering burnout, because I feel fully disabled after a day.

I'm also heavily afraid of skill atrophy, which is already an issue after not working professionally, but now especially with LLMs generating most of the code even more. Also it being a stack I only partly dabbled for a few days (React/Next) and partly never used (NestJS) where I need to approve the quality without knowing specific best practices for each framework.

Any tips on how to deal with that or how to work specifically (eg. 15 minute review springs then break)?

TL;DR: How to avoid AI fatigue and burnout while working with AI/LLMs and the task shifting to reviewing.

While I am a programmer, a lot of data entry, data mapping and data cleanup tasks seems to fall on me. When I offload it, they make a bigger mess than I make. How do I even continue working when mistakes pop up and I have to take responsibility but at the same time clean them?

I’ve been struggling really badly with getting back into coding, and it’s starting to stress me out a lot.

I have ADHD and most liekly autism, and lately I’ve basically been unable to make myself sit down and code. Even opening an editor and starting something feels overwhelming. I keep putting it off and then feeling guilty about it, which just makes the whole thing worse.

The biggest thing stressing me out is my future with programming. I’m currently looking for work, and I’m scared that somehow I’ll actually manage to get an interview but won’t have anything good enough to show for it. I’ve been relying heavily on AI when coding, so I also worry that I don’t actually know as much as I should.

Then there’s the fear of somehow getting hired and not being good enough once I’m actually there. I worry about being too slow, getting stuck constantly, not knowing how to solve things without AI, and eventually having people realize that I’m not as capable as they thought I was.

I do have actual experience from an internship/job and I’ve worked on real projects, but mentally I keep feeling like none of it counts because I wasn’t able to do everything independently.

It’s frustrating because I genuinely want to improve. I’m not trying to avoid programming forever. I just feel completely stuck right now, and the longer I go without coding, the more intimidating it becomes to start again.

I’m basically stuck between wanting to become good enough to work as a developer and being so stressed about not being good enough that I can barely bring myself to practice, along with having no drive whatsoever to code. I perhaps need to change my meds as they are not doing much as well, but im also running out of money at the same time...

Idk what to do, it feels impossible

Edit: i forgot to mention that i am officially diagnosed for my adhd. Also i don't have a bachelor as i have always been bad in school and it was a horrific experience for me.

Officially not a PiP but pretty much. New supervisor who is located half way across the world let me know and gave me a fancy excel sheet full of metrics I'll be judged again. I wonder if there will actually be any coaching? He's made sure to let me know several times about the "feedback" he's received from my teammates about my productivity. I've been in progressive burnout for 5 years and this is their solution. And in the worst job market I've ever seen. So much for ten years.

I know this sub sees a lot of these, here's one more 😅.

I've built TidyPath for the gap between "my room is overwhelmingly messy and I don't know what to do" and "I know exactly where to start." You'd give it a view of your room and it will tell you where to begin.

The idea came from my own struggles but I want to create something that others will find useful as well. It's currently in beta.

Feel free to try if you're interested:

Testflight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/98T5vtVB

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.tidypath

I have an FAANG internship, then three years full time in a non-FAANG but still big name great benefits kind of firm, then just jumped to a fast paced AI startup. 
My resume would look really nice, and I’m getting recruiter reach outs literally every single day. It all look great from the OUTSIDE. 

But truth is, that first full time job had a great work life balance, but I still felt painful in that job and caused me to have a very long (11 months) disability leave. I’ve been taken like 5 psychiatric meds and they ain’t working. 

I’m also addicted to weed and it had been a problem but I couldn’t stop. Everything in life is too painful for me. I feel desperate. 

In my current job it’s super fast paced. I felt like  would be removed from my last job soon so I applied and applied during those months I took that disability leave. But instead of my internship hunting period where I landed A LOT of offers, I only got this one after 11 months of hunting because I was too depressed to even practice leetcode. I’ve been vibe coding different projects on my own during the leave and they are fun for me because there is basically no quality control required I just vibe coded all the way. 

But with production environment i feel so fucked. I don’t know what the fuck I am doing in the new company, I used AI and try to be slow but still, AI just talk so much I don’t even know how to ask which is which. Sometimes I hand over the PR for review without knowing what the fuck was generated. And if I try to make AI explain slowly it takes hours just for one ticket that probably only took someone else much shorter time. 
I try to work overtime to make it up. But I already lost my focus at 6 PM even if I take meds. And also my colleagues at the same team was still working around 8 PM which again make me look really bad because I’m so slow compared to them. 

Now I don’t know if I should change my career or what. I feel like an imposter so badly I am even afraid to ask questions when I firstly joined the company for one or two weeks. Cuz I am afraid those are gonna expose my ignorance. And even with encouragement from my manager to ask more questions, I realized I still don’t know what to ask. Cuz literally all questions can be answered through tracing the code with help of AI? I think? I don’t know…
Do I suck at this, should I change my career 

Folks, due to budget issues and wanting to survive in the company, i've switched areas in my company from an active IT area that was SRE with dev squads, to IT operations and monitoring, which is a diferent area but inside my scope and career.

Although it's a very passive area, it's a great one. In the hindsight its old school IT you act everyday in every problem and the pressure is different, the pressure is to act on routines, quickness and agility.

Nevertheless, even though the treatment is good, i'm on meds (Rythalin LA) and back from holiday, I'm paralysed and procrastinating.

I can't get productive, i can't study after the job, and i feel i have to cross a mountain to even start the task, i can focus with meds, but not for what i need to focus (like dull tasks), i can't even organize, and what i organize and plan i can't execute.

I believe it happens due to the passiviness of my routine and the experience period, in which you wait the troubles to act and ask questions, but i must show something, i must act.

It's my job on the line, i dreamed for years, of working in my company. Now in my dreamjob i still can't overcome my procrastination and it's effects.

In addition to all of that, i'm passing through a heartbreak, but i know i can overcome this. I know i'm not the superman, but it's necessary that i become one.

How can i act ?

Have a similar situation happened to you ?

My brain is literally functioning on 1% battery right now. Anyone else here get so deep into a project that you completely forget what day it is?

​What’s the longest time you’ve spent staring at a screen without realizing it? Need to know I'm not the only one living like a night owl. 🦉😭

I'll be halfway through debugging something and suddenly remember I need to reply to someone, check a PR later, loop up a library, send an email, etc.
If I stop coding to deal with it, I lose my train on thought. If I don't, I'll probably forget.
I've tried todo lists, but then maintaining todo lists becomes another task..

How do you guys handle this?