Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure about the whole neurological dysfunction story. It sounds a lot like the now debunked chemical imbalance story for depression. So far as I know there’s no ADHD blood or other objective test. I am however sure about stimulant drugs being a shockingly effective productivity booster when properly dosed though. As the comment I’m replying to notes, it’s trivially easy to walk into a psychiatrist’s office and…
> I’m not sure about the whole neurological dysfunction story. Are you a medical professional or do you have a scientific source backing up your suspicion? The point why there is no objective blood test is mainly rooted in the fact that getting a true measurement of a neurotransmitter is prohibitively costly (measurement across intra- and inter-daily blood samples to establish a true baseline). Yet, scientists are do…
After college, I worked in an engineering org at a big tech company you've definitely heard of. A surprisingly large number of developers that I worked with suddenly got ADHD when they realized it was going to take 60+ hour weeks plus on-call to not get stack ranked out and they saw how effective drugs were making those who were using them. I am confident that some persons were just gaming the system. I know this because they explicitly said so. Not everyone tries to be objective in their self-assessment though, so I imagine many of them actually believed they had ADHD and weren't just engaging in a cynical behavior. And I suppose it doesn't really matter: it's an ego-preserving belief that doesn't appear to have any great cost. In fact, technically speaking once they got the diagnosis from a licensed physician they did have ADHD, by definition, regardless of how cynical their motivations may have been. Edit: I also believe some legitimately had ADHD. I assumed that was obvious, but I now feel like I should be explicit.
I have no doubt whatsoever that plenty of people experience one or more symptoms that are associated with ADHD. I've known too many people of whom that is true not to. ADHD is an observational diagnosis. Medical professionals are just speculating at this point when they say it's some kind of neurological disorder rather than just part of the range of physiologically normal brain function. The brain is complicated and it could be any number of things. I have no doubt that the brain can be trained to exhibit ADHD associated characteristics for example. That is after all pretty much the business model of another one of the big tech companies that you've definitely heard of that I've worked for. We euphemistically called it "engagement."