21–30 of 288 posts
I’d be interested in seeing if certain languages with extra syntax / symbols have a similar impact, or even other software stacks - the aws console, a noisy ide and c++ all give me the same feeling.
This reminds me of how Rob Pike mentioned his dislike for syntax coloring as extra cognitive load, which seems odd in regards to current IDEs filled with information and stimuli. With LLMs now directly interfaced to IDEs, it is likely that any obstacle will trigger a need for immediate AI powered dopamine reward. I wonder how programmers brains are going to rewire in this regard, even for those not subject to ADHD, b…
Finally some research on ADHD and UI. I have it and have always found GUIs confusing as hell. Most people seem to find Windows an intuitive OS, for instance. Not me. Windows up to and including XP felt pretty intuitive, but since then every version has gotten more confusing. I never know where to find stuff, how to navigate around. I'm sure there are visual cues that I'm just not capable of processing. Icons for butt…
MS Teams overloads my brain through very bad design
I find it asto ishing that research now is directed at how to figure out what works best for persons with ADHD. This will lead to many breakthroughs.
Finding solutions that work well for people with ADHD is also likely to have the added bonus of making everyone less stressed.
As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…
As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…
And I feel a kinship with current LLMs with small context sizes.
As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…
Surely this is a general problem and not specific to programmers with ADD? Or do you mean you are relatively worse at "needle sting debugging"?
You second paragraph is just sane things in general. I wish your mindset was more common among my colleagues ...
This reminds me of how Rob Pike mentioned his dislike for syntax coloring as extra cognitive load, which seems odd in regards to current IDEs filled with information and stimuli. With LLMs now directly interfaced to IDEs, it is likely that any obstacle will trigger a need for immediate AI powered dopamine reward. I wonder how programmers brains are going to rewire in this regard, even for those not subject to ADHD, b…
Pure white/black words are really painful because it causes paralysis when trying to re-read a different page or file from the current one.
I simply get stuck trying to decide what to read first, because everything looks the very same, specially outside the peak minutes of the medication.
About Copilot, for instance I found really easy to give more instructions or context, or restart with new instructions whenever it spills bullshit code, even on programming languages that are unusual for me.
The problem is when to really give up because I still believe that I can convince the bot to spill what I really need. If I'm not familiar to the problem, even knowing that the bot is spilling bullshit, I feel a analysis paralysis deciding if I will handle manually, step by step, like the "old days", or giving more context to the bot.
So becoming familiar to certain classes of problems is something helpful, instead of specific implementations in certain languages.
"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.
I’ve been surprised by this too. Maybe it’s a personal preference after all but my ADHD brain for sure prefers debugging. Debugging is sometimes more challenging and the boundaries are clearly defined : you know how the program should behave and you know when you get it. You know what doesn’t work so it’s easy to go TDD : when the test is green you are good to go ! Whereas writing new code is a pain for my dopamine s…
> Debugging is sometimes more challenging and the boundaries are clearly defined : you know how the program should behave and you know when you get it. You know what doesn’t work so it’s easy to go TDD : when the test is green you are good to go !
> Whereas writing new code is a pain for my dopamine system because I never know when it’s done.
Oooooh, that fits with my drifting towards debugging other's code (even when I have 0 experience with the language) and debugging infrastructure configuration.
I sometimes think I may have some ADHD traits but I don't believe I have it. Though I recently decided to adopt some ADHD strategies to organize my home/life and it has had some effects/benefits.
Maybe I should pivot harder away from coding and drift towards sysadmin.
When something doesn't grab me, it takes enormous effort to maintain focus. It's not that other distractions are just so incredibly moving that they take my focus away. Rather, it's that it's physically difficult if not painful to focus on the thing that evades my attention, so by comparison, anything else is better.
I have no idea if my comment speaks to the paper. I started reading it because I am at the grocery store and the checkout line is so boring, but then the paper didn't quite grab me enough either, so I'm slightly more interested now in whatever happens to be on some other screen.
But if it is studying the effect of distractions, I think they have the wrong idea (or I have something other than ADHD), because it's never about the distractions, it's about the interest in the thing that needs my attention. Nothing else matters