Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

#61

Post by brailsafe » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

adhddev wrote: post #8

Backstory: I'm a senior engineer at one of the world's top 10 tech companies. I've had ADHD (and some kind of light Asperger's) my entire life, to the point where I couldn't concentrate on anything the first 12 years or so of my academic career _except_ for certain subjects that really interested me, like math. Some things that works well for _me_: 1) Good noise-cancelling headphones. I'm extremely sensitive to noise…

Took me a while to respond, but thanks for the list. I've purchased myself a set of 3m X5A earmuffs and started using the self control app which is incredible. Been experimenting with binaural beats, which are pretty nice overall. Feels like I go into a bit of a different zone.

Regarding the noise, I was surprised by how much of a problem it was, because I love working out of coffee shops. I hope I find a way to work around it. I just wish I didn't have to have an elaborate way to escape noise just to work.

5) I don't do martial arts, but I'm a skateboarder and have been progressing through mountain hiking hopefully to mountaineering and climbing and hitting the gym 3 or more times a week. It's always been something I do, but if I get too into work or something and forget to do any of it, I do get restless and my focus deteriorates even more. Also a great way to meet people.

How did you get your sleep shit together?

Re: Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

#62

Post by brailsafe » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

m0ther wrote: post #39

afarrell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may have a significant advantage context switching for presales engineering and roles that deal with more unexpected runtime problems, etc. I would think the opposite: with lower working memory, context switching will be more painful and impose greater performance problems.

ADHD (at least in my case) makes context switching, and switching back, easy (it's a core symptom, this is the reason we have difficulty focusing). It's rare to hear one of us say "now where was I?". I equate it to the threading model; instead of a single thread, we have a main thread, and x (let's say 5) additional threads running in the background. Our scheduler is peculiar. We can swap the main thread for a backgr…

To build on this, I find that an arbitrary challenge doesn't really work for me. Deadlines, blackbox debugging, and quizzes fall into this category. I was fired from my first front-end job because much of the work ended up being me trying to debug opaque problems in Ember.js v1, and lack of productively writing CSS after solving the design and layout problems. My job was building UI, but I excelled at solving the CSS, JS, and design problems, then I'd stall at actually productively writing it. I'll usually feel guilty about falling behind and grind myself to sleep deprivation to slowly get it done.

Re: Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

#63

Post by johnisgood » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #58

johnisgood wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Eastern Europe. Could you give me any companies I could try? Ideally in Austria, English-only.

You should look at Elastic's job postings, those are all remote and the devs I've met from there, while sociable, are not social butterflies. Also, Raiffeisen and several other banks have positions listed that may be what you are looking for. Most other companies that aren't startups will probably want German language skills.

Thank you, will give them a go. :)