Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose. This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best us…
“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson
Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
91–100 of 307 posts
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#92I know this pattern from myself. I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming. Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code tak…
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk . The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
Why did you read the message and think of negative self talk? I'm just trying to learn more about your point of view.
I was just pointing out things where I struggle.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#93My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work. Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs. If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut ou…
my personal riff on that is 'stop assigning self worth to the quality that others assign to your work'. being able to internally generate self-worth through the act of producing high quality work is a super power.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#94Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress, decisions you need to take etc.
You can start with something as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...
I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something you can use to get started again.
It's quite freeing to not have to have all the context in your head all the time.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#95I note that you don’t really describe the sensations and feelings you experience, it’s framed through being ‘unmotivated’ at work. Inability to describe feelings is a classic autistic trait. I could of course be jumping the gun here but it’s definitely something to look into.
Your description of feeling like you’re the only person in the world who experiences stuff this way also remind me a lot of my own experiences with autism and the accounts of others living with it. Communication difficulties and difficulty reaching out are also rolled up with all that too.
Your descriptions of leaving tasks half done, working irregular hours, and getting distracted with something that’s not in the work item are also very common autism/adhd experiences that I see in myself and others.
It’s good that you are getting tested for ADHD - note that autism and ADHD are quite comorbid and it’s very possible you have both.
The good news is that, whether autism/adhd or depression, you are far from alone in your experiences, certainly very far from alone in this field. It does get better.
Where depression came in for me is I had a lot of self hatred about how my brain worked, and h things other people seemed to be able to do easily I had to force myself to do, with immense effort. In a way, depression is anger turned inward, and it’s very easy to be angry at yourself.
It will get better. It’s about learning how your brain works, what your limits are, and what works for you. Basically, self-compassion, because shame is only a short term motivator. It’s so easy to burn out, and so much ‘advice’ online is about pushing yourself more and more when what works is listening to and understanding yourself.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk . The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
Okay, this is a genuine question because I was trying to avoid negative self talk. Why did you read the message and think of negative self talk? I'm just trying to learn more about your point of view. I was just pointing out things where I struggle.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson
I wish he hadn't said that ! :-)
Probably a combination of those plus factors we aren't privy to.
I don't really know how to take the measure of a man and probably I'm not qualified to. I don't think he was evil though. People are complicated and not at all black and white.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#98This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause. No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD c…
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute. No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and ar…
Strattera can help (I mentioned bupropion, another SDNRI). Of course if you try stimulants and don’t respond well, it’s totally fine to just use e.g. Strattera. What I’m advocating against is e.g. “try Strattera first, if it seems to help, don’t bother with stimulants”. (Some places, cultures, or medical systems do have surprisingly strong biases against stimulants!)
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#99 > My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows:
> Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else.
If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning system one day.HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.
Please OP, close HN, reach out to people, get help, and (importantly) learn to navigate your mind, not fight with it.
Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
#100I know this pattern from myself. I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming. Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code tak…
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk . The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.