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Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

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Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#91

Post by dgellow »

benjaminsuch wrote: post #76
ojkelly wrote: post #56

It’s worth everyone knowing that there is a high proportion of neurodiverse people in our industry, relative to other industries and the general population. The 2021 Stack Overflow Survey [0] puts ADHD at 8.51% (double the rate in the US [1]), and autism at 3.7% (about 1% globally [2]). The point here is that, you all already work with people who have ADHD or are autistic. If your company isn’t doing right to retain…

I would be cautious about what people say in the survey on Stack Overflow. How many of those who claim to have ADHD or Autism have an actual diagnosis of those from a professional?

That works the other way too. You will also have a lot of people reporting they do not have ADHD or autism when they actually do.

What matters for those type of surveys is how many people report struggles. If someone struggle with attention but does not have the exact number of symptoms required for a formal diagnostic, they are still struggling.

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#92

Post by dgellow »

ojkelly wrote: post #56

It’s worth everyone knowing that there is a high proportion of neurodiverse people in our industry, relative to other industries and the general population. The 2021 Stack Overflow Survey [0] puts ADHD at 8.51% (double the rate in the US [1]), and autism at 3.7% (about 1% globally [2]). The point here is that, you all already work with people who have ADHD or are autistic. If your company isn’t doing right to retain…

Clickable link for stackoverflow survey: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-demog...

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#93

Post by pseudalopex »

burntoutfire wrote: post #37
adhd_thraway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite interesting, but I believe that procrastination and burnout are rather obvious signs of ADHD and if you experience this you should verify this. I'm a huge mental health advocate and I've been such for years (I worked with a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists when doing deep interpersonal training for business purposes and I built a lot of trust toward field) and I've been working constantly with therap…

> It's quite interesting, but I believe that procrastination and burnout are rather obvious signs of ADHD and if you experience this you should verify this. My guess is that procrastination and burnout are signs that work in our society is just not a good fit for our mental needs (see also immense popularity of video games, which provide "fake work" that is closer to what we need). I suspect there were no procrastina…

ADHD brains are physically different. You can see it with MRI. I suspect ADHD hunter gatherers hated weaving.

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#94

Post by tailspin2019 »

pdrbrtt wrote: post #78

Hello There! Former ADHD bro here. I was diagnosed with ADHD 10 months ago. At that time my life was a BIG BLOB of MESS and CHAOS. I started attending therapy sessions with a really good Therapist once a week since then. After 6 months, I had sense of every way ADHD was affecting my life, but couldn't figure out how to overcome the symptoms by myself. My therapist recommended a psychiatrist, which prescribed Vyvanse…

Congratulations on your progress and thanks for sharing your story. I think I'm a few steps behind you on this journey and it's great to hear how you've found a treatment program that works for you!

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#95

Post by krono »

notRobot wrote: post #87
krono wrote: post #19

No one wanted me and my ADHD and so I went out on my own. Now running a decently successful software/consultancy firm (not funded and not a single loan, I'm proud to say - edit: as in "told you I had it in me"). Of course this isn't an option for everyone, but starting your own business might be worth considering.

As a business owner with ADHD - what are you thoughts on hiring people who also have the condition? Are you open to making the workplace more neurodivergent-friendly?

People with ADHD would be welcome - as long as I'm confident I can manage them (manage as in helping us both help each-other and the business). This would be the same advice I'd give to anyone hiring me.

Neurodivergent-friendliness is extremely broad, but generally, yes, being less of a dick to people who can't help being the way they are is always good :)

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#96

Post by jstrodd »

pdrbrtt wrote: post #78

Hello There! Former ADHD bro here. I was diagnosed with ADHD 10 months ago. At that time my life was a BIG BLOB of MESS and CHAOS. I started attending therapy sessions with a really good Therapist once a week since then. After 6 months, I had sense of every way ADHD was affecting my life, but couldn't figure out how to overcome the symptoms by myself. My therapist recommended a psychiatrist, which prescribed Vyvanse…

Reading your comment makes me so nervous. I could have written it myself when I was in college. Back then, ADHD meds transformed my life for the better, at least during the first couple years. It was great! A pill solved all of my problems. But then, very slowly, over the course of years, I developed a much worse set of problems. Now, ten years later, I'm struggling with an addiction that affects every aspect of my life. I'm less productive than I was before I ever took meds. I've lost friends and become socially isolated. I fear that my executive function is permanently damaged.

Meds don't even make me productive anymore, they just keep the withdrawal at bay. And the withdrawal is so bad that I can't even function enough to do a time sheet right for at least a week. I can't quit my meds without great difficulty because there is simply no way for me to do that while maintaining employment. I have a family to support, so I'm trapped using this drug that has been devastating to my life in a lot of ways I'd rather not share.

Before I took meds, I was a little bit of an under-achiever and just a typical ADHD sufferer. But I was able to function and get by. Now, I'm barely able to function, and my life feels like it's constantly on the edge of falling apart due to what has become total dependency on the drug. The person I was back then is gone.

Very little research has been done on the long-term effects of prescription stimulant use. I can't say you'll end up like me, but just know that there is a large and growing community of people like me who desperately wish they never took this drug.

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#97

Post by tailspin2019 »

newaccount74 wrote: post #42

I wonder why ADHD gets singled out so much. If I look at the suggestions that would help people with ADHD, then I see suggestions that would help lots of people. Eg. not being reprimanded for being late when it has no consequences would help everyone. Good calendar software also helps everyone. There are lots of people who are struggling with the demands of the workplace -- in fact, I'm not sure I know anyone who doe…

> I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't struggle with something.

It's always a matter of degree. It's completely true that to be human, is to struggle. Life is a struggle. Most people get sad at times in their lives, many people get depressed too. Many people are disorganised. And very many people, more than ever, experience trouble focussing and concentrating at times.

But when that struggle becomes a defining and pervasive feature of your life, to the point that it's unshakable. Perhaps it affects your relationships. Maybe makes it difficult to hold down a job... That's where you start to fall under the diagnostic criteria for a long-term "condition" as opposed to just the common condition that we all share of simply being human.

And that's where workplace support of this kind may go from useful to necessary. From "makes my job easier" to "makes it possible for me to hold a job at all".

I think it's important to recognise the struggle that everyone has, as part of being human, but it's important not to overlook the significant additional struggle that people with a diagnosed condition or "neurodiversity" experience on top of this.

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#98

Post by efficientsticks »

simplyinfinity wrote: post #6

I'm not diagnosed with ADHD myself, in fact today is my first day of ADHD eval by a doctor. What you write is exactly how experience work. One thing that came to mind is contract/freelance work. Go to a contracting agancy and tell them you want to work on 3-6 month contracts. I'm currently in the process of doing this. I hope few things come out of this. 1) my brain stays engaged 2) my happniess increases 3) my savin…

Related question: I think I’d really like to work part-time so I can properly multi task on my personal projects and for-money work, rather than have this all-or-nothing choice every 3+ months. Do you have any advice you could give me about that?

Re: Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

#100

Post by karmajunkie »

redisman wrote: post #11
jstx1 wrote: post #5

> Do you know / can recommend companies with neurodiversity programs? It's very easy for companies to set up something like this for the sake of appearances, I would advise against selecting your employer based on this.

The kind of company that sets up a neurodiversity program will also not be the kind of company OP is describing he likes. Big, slow, rich companies can do stuff like that but the development work will be more bureaucratic. Small startups have you wear many hats and always put out fires and cobble things together to a solution that’s fast and kind of works. But those companies will never invest heavily into HR initiat…

This is a really important point. I left a job after 3 months despite a program like this for a number of reasons: * the "program" was mainly lip-service, as far as I could tell there was no meaningful impact in daily management * the company was so bureaucratic that it took me two weeks to get a development environment set up for lack of an MFA token setup, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. * There were a lot of elegant abstractions over code that never should have been written, which demanded weeks worth of just learning topology for the application * Political and ego conflict meant that any change I tried to make got shot down not for technical reasons but because I "hadn't paid my dues" for credibility.

I've done much better with early- and mid-stage startups with lots of problems to be handled and all the encouragement in the world to go after them, even without these "neurodivergence programs". Of course, you're getting into another world of life problems (e.g. these companies rarely have parental leave worth mentioning) but you can usually work around the edges.

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