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Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

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Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#51

Post by VHRanger »

rightbyte wrote: post #27
dkh wrote: post #16

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…

> flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once 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 ...

ADHD is a quantitative disorder, not qualitative.

To some extent, everyone gets mild versions of ADHD symptoms, especially if tired/bad nutrition/no exercise, etc.

ADHD is when these symptoms harm quality of life significantly across many domains and since you were prepubescent (it's a brain malformation, not a series of bad habits)

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#52

Post by rodrigodlu »

swader999 wrote: post #11

So a low frills just the code IDE is better for ADHD. Wonder if single monitor and even single code pane at a time also boosts an ADHD brains productivity. Suspect it does. Another aspect of focus is fixation on a specific physical space with lowered blink rate. As soon as you move your eyes away or blink it lowers your concentration. The text outside of this cone of sight is less sharp. It's like a hunter that finds…

Yup, even with a giant 4k display, I have only a single tab/window open.

2 windows side by side tops.

I found that two displays of different sizes better as well. The smaller is clearly the secondary.

I wish that an easy way to switch all windows on different displays in the same workspace is available.

I tried to program myself some combos with Gnome and Pop Shell shortcuts macros, but it's not quite there. It's only consistent on the same display, same workspace, and that is not enough to drain some attention spared on secondary stuff, like the documentation/test window while I'm writing the code.

The closest I got that is consistent is to have two tmux sessions in different displays and coordinate a simultaneous change of sessions of both displays. But that doesn't cover GUIs.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#53

Post by carlmr »

dkh wrote: post #16

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…

>it is easy for me to flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once.

So much this. Fuck OOP-inheritance-thinking for spreading implementations to so many files.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#54

Post by vanderZwan »

dkh wrote: post #16

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…

> unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained

Tangent: ADHD is strange. I have it too, and yet when it comes to reading my symptoms appear to be the exact opposite (when I was younger I could not stop reading books until I finished them, even if I ended up skipping an entire night of sleep for it). I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decades, as we learn more about it, this diagnosis will split into multiple different comorbid disorders with overlapping symptoms.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#55

Post by vanderZwan »

giantg2 wrote: post #41
dakom wrote: post #30

When a problem has my attention, nothing can phase me. I get hyperfocused. Music, colors, the need to eat or sleep.. doesn't matter. All that gets put aside, the thing that has my attention has my full and undivided attention 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 ph…

Sounds a fair amount like me. I'm autistic.

There are overlapping symptoms between the two. There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#56

Post by manfre »

bloopernova wrote: post #34

I have ADD and I'm struggling to write a more complex Python app right now. I'm hating myself for not being able to easily skip around the code as it gets more complex with more classes and methods. So this is very apropos for me. Thing is, I can skip around Terraform much more easily (in my normal DevOps role). I'm wondering if Python whitespace isn't "right" for me somehow. EDIT: I'm definitely more used to Terrafo…

2000 lines in a single script file is a lot to mentally process. Unlike a large utils.py (the junk drawer of a putting module), with a script there is often a wide range of functions and classes.

My best advice would be turn this into a more organized package that you install with pipx[0] on the systems that need it. The click[1] package is helpful too.

[0] https://pypi.org/project/pipx/ [1] https://pypi.org/project/click/

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#57

Post by rodrigodlu »

phito wrote: post #45
swader999 wrote: post #11

So a low frills just the code IDE is better for ADHD. Wonder if single monitor and even single code pane at a time also boosts an ADHD brains productivity. Suspect it does. Another aspect of focus is fixation on a specific physical space with lowered blink rate. As soon as you move your eyes away or blink it lowers your concentration. The text outside of this cone of sight is less sharp. It's like a hunter that finds…

Oh yes that is definitely the case for me. I can have laser focus when I'm working on my laptop with just one window on foreground at the time, and I get distracted a lot on my comfy dual monitor desktop.

Give a try on displays of different sizes, like a 13/15 laptop with 27 external.

The best I found is 21 and 27, just need to find a decent 21 modern replacement that is not low contrast LCD.

Even better if you can dim the brightness of the secondary display.

With the notebook display I can just use the brightness shortcut of my keyboard (both on Logitech MX or my Keychron one).

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#58

Post by vanderZwan »

dakom wrote: post #30

When a problem has my attention, nothing can phase me. I get hyperfocused. Music, colors, the need to eat or sleep.. doesn't matter. All that gets put aside, the thing that has my attention has my full and undivided attention 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 ph…

> 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.

If I had to describe the feeling it's the mental equivalent of trying to push the same poles of two strong magnets together, while the distractions are like trying to avoid the north-south poles from attracting to each other.

Especially the part where as soon as you stop applying force (i.e. mental effort) it flips.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#59

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

pjerem wrote: post #12
agroot12 wrote: post #6

"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…

As I was writing in another comment, I have a very clear deficit of attention and I love debugging! Especially when it's urgent, and I'm basically livecoding in front of other devs or clients, jumping about in our codebase, hacking through breakpoints and the interactive console.

It helps that JVM debugging is very good (can be done remotely over the network, can insert code, add conditional breakpoints, suspend single threads etc.) It's an almost lisp like experience!

And a bug report is the most scoped task I ever encounter frankly. You have a clear success condition, often a pretty clear deadline ("now!" or "before the release window"!) In fact, if anything I tend to take support tasks way too often, to the detriment of my feature building work.

When I get an email with a title like "Intermittent null pointer exception in running prod application", I just know I'll have a really good few days!

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#60

Post by dkh »

giantg2 wrote: post #36
dkh wrote: post #16

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 why I almost exclusively join small/new teams who don't yet have an enormous codebase that I'll have to wrap my head around." How do you find these teams? In my 11 years, I don't think I've ever found myself on a greenfield project.

I live in Southern California where there was no shortage (until recently, at least) of very early-stage startups, and for years I exclusively used startup-focused sites like AngelList (now Wellfound) when jobhunting. The largest startup had 12 people when I joined. I worked for a company of 40ish once, but they weren't primarily a tech company and engineering consisted of only 3 people.

I should perhaps disclaim that while this worked perfectly for me for close to a decade and I was never without work for more than a couple weeks at a time, I have currently been unemployed for a few months and have had a considerably more difficult time than at any point in the past.

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