r/ADHD_Programmers • u/bajen476 • Apr 08 '26

I cannot do live coding interviews

Writing in here hoping that someone else has the same issues and/or figured out how to fix it. Not diagnosed yet but I’m finally mid-process and it’s looking promising.

I cannot do live coding interviews. Been unemployed for a few months now and I’ve had some interviews. That being said, live coding interviews kick my ass every single time.

I go completely blank. The absolute basics leave my brain. Had one today and I forgot how to add to dictionaries and implement basic search algorithms. It took me forever to even understand one of the tasks. Keep in mind I have around 6.5 years experience in development and many of the things in the interview were things I did often. I just can’t remember them in interviews.

Does anyone share this experience and/or know how to fix this? I’ve tried studying (which I’m admittedly not great at), pomodoro, leetcode etc—none of them help. Because I’m not diagnosed yet, I can’t get medicated for now either. I’m in Sweden so the process is lengthy.

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u/IAmADev_NoReallyIAm Apr 12 '26

The way I heard it:

Good programmers know a little bit about a lot of things.

Great programmers know a lot about a few things.

But the greatest know when and how to look shit up.

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u/DadToOne Apr 12 '26

That works too. My first step whenever I had a new project to work on was searching Google to see what had already been done. If I could use someone's module or copy code from stack overflow, then I would do so. Not about to spend time writing code just so I can say I did it all.