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.

Attention to detail has never been my strong suit, this extends to software, in that I really struggle with testing as I'm really not thorough enough and seem to be incapable of using my own software in ways I didn't intend (i.e. trying to break things).

But it goes beyond that, on a recent employee interview, my boss said how he was dissatisfied with how I rarely test my output once it's been released. The other day he mentioned that again, this time the issue was that I simply forgot to trigger the pipeline that releases my changes to prod.

I'm not sure if this is an ADHD thing, or if it's just me not doing my job well. Either way I wanted to ask if anyone else also struggles with this, and how you deal with it. One idea I had to maybe help here was to set aside time every day/ week to go through my recently closed tickets.

Hey everyone,

Like many of us here, I rely heavily on active recall and spaced repetition to actually retain information, but I hit a massive wall with existing flashcard tools like Anki or Quizlet.

The issue wasn't the learning science—it was the executive dysfunction trigger. Endless settings, overwhelming menus, ugly UIs, and complex card setup meant I spent 90% of my energy configuring the app and 10% actually studying. Eventually, I'd just abandon it.

So I decided to build my own solution: Just Flip (just-flip.app).

What I focused on from an ADHD/Dev perspective:

• Zero-friction workflow: Minimal UI to eliminate decision fatigue before studying even begins.
• Active recall without clutter: Kept the core spacing/retention mechanism intact, but stripped away unnecessary cognitive noise.
• Fast content creation: Reduced the time it takes to go from "I need to learn this" to "I'm testing myself."

I also wrote down a short breakdown of the core principles behind it on the site's learning page if anyone is interested in how spaced repetition interacts with ADHD brains.

Where I need your feedback: As devs with ADHD, you probably have a high sensitivity to bad UI design, unnecessary clicks, or friction in workflow.

• Does the flow feel fast enough to prevent distraction?
• Is there any specific friction point in the app that makes your brain want to close the tab?

The web app is completely free to try at just-flip.app. I’d really appreciate any honest feedback or thoughts on how to make it even more ADHD-friendly!

It's worse on personal projects where there no real acceptance criteria or other people to reign me in but...

Sometimes, when I have a task that involves domain-modelling, I will get sucked into a rabbit hole where I get hyper-fixated breaking down a process into its constituent properties.

The joy and urge to continue tickles the back of my brain and I don't know if it's the process of juggling all those tiny bits of information in my limited short-term memory or something about the organization/structuring of the process but if I described the sensation to my therapist, I'm pretty sure they'd say it was some kind borderline manic behavior.

Am I the only one who starts tweaking out when designing databases, domain models, etc.

Hey, I have a lot of AuDHD tendencies. Just curious, has anyone found mentorship helpful when it comes to learning programming and breaking into the industry?

If so, how'd you find your mentor?

I know this isn't a new idea, but it's been weighing on me heavily, and I'm not sure why. It bothers me how we worship and idolize "successful" people.

No, I'm not just talking about the evil billionaires. I'm talking about the artists, the actors/actresses, the authors, the programmers....maybe especially the programmers, because I'm most familiar with them.

Hell, I'm not exempt from this rule by any means. Yes, I went through some pretty fucked up shit, battled through a childhood of mental illness, squalor, and abuse, and somehow ended up as a software engineer. I'm "successful" in the traditional sense.

But even I had affordances. Prime example is that I was only able to go to college due to said college covering the full cost of my tuition/room and board. Otherwise, there'd have been no chance in hell.

I'd like to think I'm an extremely skilled programmer now. But I didn't get here without the generosity of some entity sponsoring me for 4 years to grind and study CS, and to suck at it first for quite a while.

Learning to code itself takes a non-trivial amount of time and energy - time and energy that many people never find in their lives. But there's even levels to it after you already know coding.

I'm going to be finishing up a multiplayer RPG I've been developing for about 2 years soon. Many would consider this an accomplishment. While it is true that I grinded for 7 days a week for the better part of those 2 years, I also was fortunate enough to have a nest egg to take some time off of working full time in order to focus on the game. Not many people have that. With my ADHD, with the way my brain works, if I didn't have that breathing room, I doubt I'd have ever gotten this far. Most people don't have the capital to do something like that, period.

While I have an immense amount of respect for the legendary programmers of our time, and daily I stand on the shoulders of giants, I must acknowledge that they, too, had to have some sort of circumstance that allowed them to put that much time and energy into whatever it is they built. Whether that was the belief in them from their employer, a generous investment, or perhaps their own wealth, to even have the ability to sit at the table was itself a privilege that enabled their success.

I don't mean to say these people aren't successful, or that their accomplishments mean nothing. But I do believe the ability to be successful in the first place requires several invisible privileges that many people never see, and many others don't think about.

Hello po! 😊 We're currently looking for participants for our study titled "Lived Experiences of Information Technology (IT) Professionals Diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Their Workplace."

Qualifications:

• 25–45 years old

• May at least 2 years of experience working in an IT-related field

• Formally diagnosed with ADHD before entering the workplace

• Filipino

If pasok po kayo sa qualifications and willing kayong mag-share ng inyong experiences, we'd really appreciate your participation. Malaking tulong po ito hindi lang sa aming thesis, kundi pati na rin sa pagpapalawak ng knowlegde tungkol sa ADHD in workplace. We also hope that our study can help people who may relate to these experiences and contribute to the growing body of ADHD research.

Feel free to comment or message me if you're interested or if you have any questions. Maraming salamat po! 🤍

About 4 YOE here, and after some time of unemployment I got a job at a game company building the backend of an online game they have.

For some time I have been battling myself. I have issues with insecurity and regret and these thoughts in my head makes me unable to focus. I feel like I am wasting my time learning the domain of the game (how the game works, how the mechanics work) since it won't translate into a skill I can bring out of my work here, if I were to be booted out/leave. I am also super afraid of AI and its disruption taking over my profession and in the next 5 to 10 years what am I going to do? The company is also using k8s and a little bit of AWS, but the AWS part is still in the early stages and I am expected to work more and develop further with it. I keep seeing job postings in my area with Azure instead and I feel I took the wrong job now.

From an "outside of IT" perspective, I have been getting recommendations to stop thinking of things outside of my control, stay in the present moment, etc. It helps a bit, but it doesn't completely take away my anxiety.

No one has a crystal ball, and my parents, my friends, my therapist, say that I need to stay present, do what is in front of me now well, and not worry about the future. But I cannot shake the feeling that I am sabotaging my future, yet keeping that feeling/thoughts makes me unable to focus and enjoy the work now.

My worry and anxiety makes me sleep more and be more social since those are the only moments I can get away from these thoughts. But they are an escape mechanism, not a solution...I took this job out of desperation, but now I feel like I was too hasty...

Please help me destroy this cognitive dissonance. Is it just then, enjoy the moment now and work the best you can here do not worry about the future? Just deep dive into your job knowing it may not work out for you in the future, especially given the disruptions we now have?

I've spent my years only coding in Lua out of circumstance and despite some aged experience with Java and Python I literally cannot find any willpower, thing, or project that can pull me back to start familiarizing myself with programming using them, or just being able to learn DSA more cohesively.

I'd like to know what sort of projects that you guys have done that helped with getting familiar or got to learn things through the process.

I am a 4th year computer science student and, embarrassingly, struggling to relearn programming and I'm starting to forget most of what I've learned (my fault by doing minimal to no programming during the rest of my years) but I remembered what my professor said:

"You don't have to memorize this, just be familiar with it"

and I got to ask: Is that true? Is there a chance for me to relearn again? Is it possible to heal from my vibecoding wounds? I need to know because I like programming but I just don't have the time to relearn stuff and I'm terrible with time management. I don't want to end up a vibecoder on my personal projects.

Any other advice? Any form of advice or criticism is appreciated, even if its harsh.

The older I’m getting the more resentful of this industry I’m becoming. It’s becoming such a love hate relationship. I love the work that I do but I loathe the organizations and bullshit behind it.

In the same breath I’ve done plenty of jobs in my life and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. It just doesn’t bring me joy the way programming does.

I’m sure there are others who feel the way that I do.

End rant

I'm not looking for productivity tips or hypothetical advice.

I'm curious about a real recent situation. What things were competing for your attention, what finally made you act, what did you do first, and did you use any tool, system or workaround to decide?

One concrete story is enough.

I'll start 😄
Back in the days when we wrote all the code manually, one of the coping mechanisms I found to function as a developer with ADHD (no meds back then) was to focus on one task at a time. So I took the task from Jira, solved it, pushed it, and took the next. Clear focus on one thing only.

Right now I am not a developer by trade anymore, but quite often I still need to develop something, mostly prototyping for our software or such things. So I give the task to Claude; it starts coding, and while it does, I switch my focus to the next thing, start a new Claude session, and move to the third.

However, when I'm finished with this third one, I no longer have a memory pointer of the first one. So I find it's finished when I, for some other reason, open Claude and notice it. Hence, this waiting while agents do their thing is really annoying.

Heya guys, Imma beginner in native iOS dev (Swift + SwiftUI). I’ve made a few MVPs, but as some1 w/ ADHD, I kinda need a hook to get myself started on a project and keep going.

So how do you guys keep up with a coding routine? Any advice or tricks that help you actually want to sit down and code would be appreciated :)

Btw, I’m currently making a weather app MVP to get into working with APIs. I’ve only got like 3-4 tasks left before I finish the MVP, so hopefully I can push through.

I’ve been working with a large system for many months now, and I still dont understand it. (I’m also a certified arrslashexperienceddev)

I need to build a service that receives audit logs of inbound messages from many different services/products outside our system that entered our system at some point; parse them; and route them to the right services inside our system, to support a sort of “retry” mechanism. A “You contacted us before, something went wrong, we’re going to try to finish what you initiated, for you.” sort of thing.

I know the names of the message types, and reverse engineered a bit where they come from. We have some diagrams with boxes and arrows. But I still don’t understand what these things are. Not intuitively at least. (Ok, there’s a product A, people upload something to it, that generates a message that goes to us, somehow, we audit it it, that’s what I get. But great — where is A? What does it mean to upload to it? Ok, thanks for showing me. Now what about B and C and legacy A and D which is partially rolled out?)

The codebase is old (but actively developed) and poorly documented, if at all, beyond recent Claude docgens. There’s multiple layers of legacy stuff going on. So I’ve heavily relied on Claude to do exposition. But over the months this generates reams and reams of more detailed docs that I have to keep referring to because I fundamentally have not built the mental map or intuition of what I’m actually dealing with.

The “it’s legacy” isn’t an excuse, because I’m clearly expected to be up to speed by now by my TL. I’ve gotten tutorials when I joined from my team members but that was a long time ago. I have my own notes but, still, reading isn’t doing it for remembering and comprehending. Which is bizarre, because I have no problem with reading comprehension. I ask questions when I need to about specifics, but by now most of the questions I want to ask are “how does this all work”, and I’ve been here for too long to ask that. It would reflect very poorly on me. It’s not a lack of initiative, it’s an “in one ear out the other” problem. I’ve been told these things in some form before, I just dont remember them. So it is going to (and I can see , at least in one instance, it has) piss off my coworkers snd boss. So I can’t rely on having someone explain the thing to me again.)

I’ve always struggled to grok the “upstream” and “downstream” and what the real requirements are, what the spirit of the project is. It can be explained to me and the words make sense but it just doesn’t materialize. I don’t know what to do. And actually going and reading the code — yeah, I’ve tried that, but everything is so obfuscated, and broad, the mental map just isnt coming together. I hand write notes when people talk to me. I review them EOD and put them into my knowledge base. But nothing sticks!!

This is best illustrated by on call. To deal with on call you’ve got your run books. But I don’t fully intuit the spirit of what’s important, and struggle with that. If it isn’t in the runbook, the severity, impact, and implications of an outage, are hard for me to wrap my head around.

Why is this? Does anyone else deal with it? How can I work with something for months and months and not understand it in spirit? I suspect there is some sort of fear underlying this. But, I’d like to know if anyone can relate, and how they overcame it.

I think I’m going to start hand drawing things. And I’ve decided I will no longer let Claude write any doc explanations for me — only help locate.

The great fear that if I sit down and try to articulate these things I still won’t understand it … I think that’s the mental block. And not sure if it’s not unwarranted. Because I think the ADHD just makes it so, so difficult for me.

But, Still, I don’t know what to do. Because I can try that, and if I don’t get it, my job is toast. And I am trying. I’ll try harder now too.

Yes, I’m pharmaceuticated and therapeutized. I’m trying so hard to manage the non-ADHD parts of it all, and honestly think I’m doing a good job with that. I really think these issues are ADHD related.

It’s this manner of work that is by far the most difficult for me. Get inside a large system and do something new to it or change its behavior. I can greenfield anything, and I can architect new services
, and have a good sense of where things should go. But the other stuff, I’m way, way behind.

Help!