Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

Just take a bunch of stimulants and study leetcode, then go work at microsoft or google. They both have tons of easy boring work at a slow pace with good pay. Theres really no other option

1. Find strategies to limit your field of vision like wearing a hat with a brim. Also limiting your feels of audio, noise isolating phones linked to white noise is a strong strategy. For White noise I use the YouTube live stream from the aloha cabled observatory

2. Allow yourself to work in different locations, don't get married to a single desk

3. Spend the last hour of every day wrapping up your work and documenting a personal list for tomorrow

4. Do not allow yourself to stay late just because a problem isn't solved. It's better to learn to wrap a project up, than solve it. ADHD can a habit of taking every evening from you when on a focus high

4. Pick up a course online that is relevant to work and follow it

5. I found my ability to focus significantly better with single technology tickets. I would encourage changing technologies and projects often, but the fewer technologies supporting any individual ticket the easier this has been on my brain.

6. Take a walk after every meal

7. You can find difficulty in different tasks. Becoming very good at ticket triage and documenting process is valuable and a lot of developers are bad at it.

8. Using a time tracker can be helpful, assuming it is low enough profile. I use hamster with its accompanying gnome plugin. Unfortunately I have never seen an offline solution as simple as this

I'll throw in a good pair of noise canceling headphones.

I’ve never been diagnosed but I had trouble focusing on anything that wasn’t sports or any activity that was highly stimulating.

Your goal should be getting into a ‘flow’ state. Like many commenters before me, headphones, spotify and in a place without distractions. Start by reading a piece of code, go through it step by step until it makes sense. Keep doing this until you’re ready to work. Now you want to define a task, continue working until you lose your ‘flow’ state. Take a break, stand up and stretch. Now go back your work station and repeat that process. After 3 weeks of building this muscle you should see significant results.

Best of luck.

Every single developer I know has some degree of ADHD. I personally don't have it as bad but I know a colleague who literally can't shut up and stop moving and bothering us all the time. Honestly If the person is not aware of their condition I don't think you can do anything about it besides try to isolate and ignore them somehow.