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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

#121

Post by ck425 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #80
VHRanger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

To expand on that, I think it can be clarified somewhat by describing the mechanism at work. People without ADHD have a generally-working motivation/reward system which is undergirded partially by dopamine. This neurotransmitter is relatively low in ADHD brains, which seems to lead to signal:noise issues. That’s likely a cause of having a highly distractible baseline state, but also leads to bursts of dopamine seemin…

It's also why hyperfocus is common and more extreme in ADHD. You can't always control it but when you do get into something everything else becomes a blur and you can go for hours because that high burst of dopamine obliterates everything else.

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

#122

Post by bob1029 »

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor. Empathize with the user: People with far less time than you are trying to paste some hot mess right off their clipboard to work with. They've probably got a super nasty idea in their head they can barely hold on to.

Visual studio proper is a 100% circus for me now. I can power through it, but I lose tabs in about 15 seconds after opening them. Many times I feel convinced these tools have been engineered with intent to be shittier over time and slow down neurodivergent users. The ADHD/etc crowd is definitely the #1 thing a software company needs to worry about in terms of moat maintenance...

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

#123

Post by delecti »

brucificus wrote: post #110

I had something flickering in my IDE the other day while I was trying to learn my way around a large monolithic codebase at a new job. I couldn't executive function well enough to stop/hide the flickering, and I couldn't ignore it. I eventually had a meltdown and left the room (wfh, thankfully). It took me hours to recover. Having a tidy, visually "muted" workspace - both in a literal sense (the IDE) as well as a con…

I can absolutely relate to that sentiment. A former coworker once gleefully refactored a bunch of unit tests in a way that reduced duplication and made the reporting marginally better, at the cost of making the cognitive load vastly worse to read them. I told them I couldn't review the PR, though neglected to mention that it was because it gave me a meltdown trying.

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

#124

Post by bitwize »

rahen wrote: post #10

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…

Syntax highlight never bothered me, and could even be helpful. But I can see where Pike is coming from.

What drives me nuts is autocomplete, because it pops things into my vision automagically while I'm trying to focus on the code, and even effects a mode change (some keys do different things when autocomplete is active).

Almost if not as bad, is when I'm working on someone else's code, and they misspelled a word when defining the class/method/function/variable, and now that misspelling is everywhere in the code because every other time they used the identifier they typed the first four characters max and then mashed TAB to autocomplete it!

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

#125

Post by phito »

bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

I love intellij/rider's Distraction Free mode, combined with shortcuts and no mouse

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

#126

Post by whartung »

npunt wrote: post #81
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…

This idea of a 'small brain buffer' is why I love writing small atomic notes in wikis [1]. It lets me break problems down into simple pieces that I can later assemble upward in abstraction, rather than try to hold complex ideas in my head and compile them together in one big document. The buffer waxes and wanes, and I need to be able to adapt my writing process so I'm productive no matter where it is at the moment. […

Do you have this issue of where you start in on something, you’re making progress, there’s velocity, the work seems cogent, and then...it’s gone.

Whatever point you had, whatever drive was there, is just gone. The wind has calmed and the sails just drop loose on the mast.

This happens to me, both in my own work, or writing something like this, and then I just dump it.

Kind of aggravating.

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

#127

Post by sfteus »

Anecdotally as someone with ADHD, one of my favorite features in Jetbrains IDEs is that I can double click on the tab / filename to hide everything irrelevant to what I'm looking at, and repeat to bring it all back when needed in the same state that it was in previously.

When I'm doing like a root cause sort of search by using the find window (via Ctrl/Cmd + Enter) and pulling up individual results, and using other tools such as the explorer / git history / terminal / whatever else. If I need to focus on the code I can temporarily hide everything, then bring it back up when I'm ready to move to the next result.

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

#128

Post by digdugdirk »

brucificus wrote: post #110

I had something flickering in my IDE the other day while I was trying to learn my way around a large monolithic codebase at a new job. I couldn't executive function well enough to stop/hide the flickering, and I couldn't ignore it. I eventually had a meltdown and left the room (wfh, thankfully). It took me hours to recover. Having a tidy, visually "muted" workspace - both in a literal sense (the IDE) as well as a con…

This hits home. Especially the "hours to recover" part. I never quite appreciate how long it takes to right the ship after a day like that.

Do you have any tips for how you structure your digital workspace? Favourite tools or methods to help support your executive functioning?

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

#129

Post by kzrdude »

bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

I'm sorry to shame here, but one of my favourite environments jupyterlab has started with the same thing. Update notification popup. And this is python, where I specificed exact version in my requirements file.

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

#130

Post by adfm »

sfteus wrote: post #127

Anecdotally as someone with ADHD, one of my favorite features in Jetbrains IDEs is that I can double click on the tab / filename to hide everything irrelevant to what I'm looking at, and repeat to bring it all back when needed in the same state that it was in previously. When I'm doing like a root cause sort of search by using the find window (via Ctrl/Cmd + Enter) and pulling up individual results, and using other t…

There's also a focused "zen mode" for VSC.
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