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Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

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Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#341

Post by JohnBooty »

Teridee wrote: post #112
keyle wrote: post #33

This hits home. I think we need to really take a hard look at today's world of tech and how we communicate and collaborate. I find that, if time allows, I get a massive productivity boost after 4:30pm and everyone is either winding down or leaving. All the sudden, the walls flatten, the horizon deepens and I enter a deep state of flow. Around 10 AM, after an elongated "stand up", I should be ready to go... And yet it…

At my company, we have daily standups and they throw off my whole morning. I only really work effectively when I am left to it and so have outlook/slack/messages turned off during periods where I am trying to focus - has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do. The piece was a good read but its so personal to me that it doesn't really help sadly.

Standups kind of destroy my flow as well. HOWEVER:

- Everything destroys my flow anyway. So $#&#$% fragile.

- Standups are 100x less destructive to my flow than random unscheduled synchronous communication.

- For management and collaboration purposes, I recognize the need for some kind of synchronous communication for most projects/jobs.

- When working remotely I've found video standups help keep me feeling connected to humanity.

- Most teams I've been on are quite understanding if you choose to miss standup and offer an update via Slack instead because you're "in the zone."

So.... they suck, but they have upsides for me, and I accept them as kind of a "least-bad compromise solution."

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#342

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

autoexec wrote: post #183
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems likely to be a placebo. You have a vested interest in it working, admit its not based on any sort of science, and one of the setup steps is to overcome distraction (which is the problem that’s trying to be solved). Fundamentally, if it works for the OP, who the hell cares? And how would you even double-blind test this anyway?

> And how would you even double-blind test this anyway? Get lights that either start fast and slow down or blink at speeds that randomly change then use serial numbers to track which lights are which, but send them out at random to test subjects?

Which treatment you're in is relatively easily detectable, so unfortunately that wouldn't work.

I like the approach though, it would be a reasonable control condition (assuming that the 60bpm is a core part of the effect).

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#343

Post by JohnBooty »

swozey wrote: post #306
flir wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I like the daily meeting - gives me an anchor for my day that works with the meds. But like most ADHD people when unmedicated I get more productive at night, so I can see why you'd hate the daily checkin.

I'm about 20 years in and the first 10 years of my career as a SWE I had absolutely horrendous managers and daily checkins felt more like proving to someone that you had done any work the day prior, shaming you if you didn't produce enough. I have a hugely negative connotation to them even today, vs feeling that they're a positive team-collab sort of scenario. At two companies the actual CEO and CTO were in every sin…

It's funny how good (or shitty) experiences shape things. I like peer reviews and regular 1:1s with management. I've had good experiences with them, and have sorely missed them at jobs where they didn't happen.

But I know good engineers (who are also good communicators) that loathe them with a great passion.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#344

Post by greenie_beans »

swozey wrote: post #262
flir wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH encourages scheduled meetings. It's a nightmare. I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me, because in the run-up to the meeting I won't try to start anything (what's the point if I've got a pending interruption?) At least my standups are first thing in the morning.

I don't understand it. My company is fully remote but they are absolutely horrendous at async comms. I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting. Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you. Thanks.…

that's unfortunate, you have 20 years of experience but don't want to pair program or help out other developers.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#345

Post by dboreham »

Teridee wrote: post #112
keyle wrote: post #33

This hits home. I think we need to really take a hard look at today's world of tech and how we communicate and collaborate. I find that, if time allows, I get a massive productivity boost after 4:30pm and everyone is either winding down or leaving. All the sudden, the walls flatten, the horizon deepens and I enter a deep state of flow. Around 10 AM, after an elongated "stand up", I should be ready to go... And yet it…

At my company, we have daily standups and they throw off my whole morning. I only really work effectively when I am left to it and so have outlook/slack/messages turned off during periods where I am trying to focus - has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do. The piece was a good read but its so personal to me that it doesn't really help sadly.

This is because your brain is like ChatGPT: it's in a loop generating the next symbol based on the prior context. You need to load the context up, then you're ready to generate symbols. If there's a BS meeting, all that context is paged out and now you need to re-load it. Plus there are motivational aspects that make "loading context some AH manager just blew out my brain" more difficult.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#346

Post by nbaugh1 »

dijit wrote: post #121
mathieuh wrote: post #92

I used to think I had some ADHD symptoms: growing up I never did any revision for any of my school exams until a couple of days before, all my coursework and projects were done last minute in a week of intense focus, I've had issues with drugs in the past etc. Then I met someone who actually has ADHD and saw them before they'd taken their stimulant drugs. They were completely nonfunctional in any sense of the word, t…

Well. 1. Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis. 2. Things exist on a spectrum. The definition of it becoming a "disorder" is when it negatively affects your life enough. During diagnosis a psychotherapist will be tasked with identifying traits of ADHD (IE; Markers), you will not have all markers. Everyone will have some. Then those markers are investigated to discover how much they impact your quality of life. If it is a…

Exactly. So so so many people do not understand this element of psychological disorders

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#347

Post by Geee »

What I've learned is that there isn't such thing as focus. Focusing is not something you can do. Focus is simply a lack of distractions. If you block all distractions, the only thing left is focus. Blocking distractions is something you can do, if you want to.

The major issue is how to catch up with important news and developments without getting distracted.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#348

Post by nathell »

I’m 39. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD/AS about 11 months ago, after having seen a psychiatrist complaining about chronic fatigue (cf. my Ask HN from two years ago [0]).

Methylphenidate has helped _immensely_. As has accepting the wiring of my brain, taking a two-months sabbatical, and practicing awareness about the ADHD habits. I’m having the year of my life. I can’t remember being productive this consistently basically ever.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#349

Post by muhblah »

swader999 wrote: post #302
muhblah wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reflects exactly my day to day struggles. Especially that productivity boost when every one starts leaving, and I _was not able_ to finished the smallest one of my tasks planned for the day 'til then most of the time. I'm writing "was not able" on purpose here, because as someone (being blessed) with ADHD, your brain does not allow you to make progress on the smallest tasks due to all those fireworks being blown…

Yup, I think all the meds for this can succumb to tolerance. A real life Flowers for Algernon. Over the years I've upped the dose, switched meds, drug holidays but nothing has matched how well my brain worked the first couple of years on meds.

> nothing has matched how well my brain worked the first couple of years on meds

As someone who also has a bit more than 2 decades experience with ADHD medication and started with meds quite early in my teenage years when I went to school, I have very similar experience to yours.

One of my assumptions is that it also has a lot to do with the humans metabolism that changes over the years.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#350

Post by pch00 »

deafpolygon wrote: post #266

Had me until "Obsidian" - absolute worst thing ever for my ADHD. Hours spent tinkering ... experimenting with plugins. I was on the verge of developing plugins before I realized: I wasn't getting anything done. I gave up and went with OneNote. The freeform canvas is a godsend for my ADHD (I am able to lay things out spatially left and right), but I'm not able to tinker with it as much anymore.

So much this. My inbuilt desire for perfectionism occasionally leads me to believe I can create "the perfect system!" using tools like Obsidian, etc but what actually happens is that I spend a large amount of time working on the system and forgetting about the actual tasks I needed to do.

OneNote with it's "paste anything, anywhere on the page" and fairly minimal organisational options make it the closest thing to a notebook/scrapbook I've ever used on a computer. It's not perfect, and I've come to accept that :-)

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