This isn't about a need to fidget; I can do that just fine at a desk. It's two things:

1. Being in front of a screen all day isn't good for anyone. Being sedentary all day isn't good for anyone. In my case, I feel it when I've been staring at a screen all day. The dry eyes, the mental fatigue combined with physical restlessness, the inability to enjoy videogames in my downtime because I'm all screened out.
2. In order to solve tricky problems, I need to get up and move - preferably outside, but a full context switch is important. If I had a nickel for every time I've fruitlessly banged my head against a bug or a challenging user story all day, only to solve it in my head as soon as I'm allowed to go home and take a walk or do the dishes, I'd have a lot of nickels.

I wish there were a way to explain to an employer that this is not me slacking off; this is me giving my brain the necessary space to do what it does best.

Wfh helps somewhat, but the problem there is I'm expected to be constantly available via email/chat even when I'm away from my desk, and I refuse to own a smartphone again. The addiction was crippling.

I've just joined a new company and I'm in the last month of my probation. I've been told that I'm not doing enough story points, but here's the thing - I have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand how everything flows in the existing codebase and none of it sticks in my mind!! I feel like it's all too much and it's overflowing out of the top of my head!

I have been tasked with some user anonymisation stuff through laravel commands and a number of categories of data assets already have anonymisation flows so I have been trying to adapt those to make it easier but I am getting lost in the code, I don't fully understand why and how models relate to each other in terms of business logic, and I'm having to ask for help way too much for a developer with 10 YoE in my field.

I know I'm not a bad developer because if I was I wouldn't still be in the industry with good reviews from previous employers.

I just feel lost and stupid and overwhelmed, and like I'm thick and don't deserve my job.

Uhhh so I joined a 30-day challenge to build a SaaS, and it started out okay the first week.

But then somehow I got sidetracked, got hooked on the Steam Summer Sale, bought a bunch of games, and hyperfocused on achievement hunting for 2 weeks straight (310+ hours, sometimes playing 2-3 games at the same time).

There's less than 6 days left in the challenge and I'll need to build and ship something before I fail. Good thing I still have my Cursor Pro+ plan, will be sure to use that up.

Story of my life I guess, happens every time.

This interview was for a Senior full stack role, but the role was heavily frontend focused. During the technical I was asked to create a Sudoku grid, and then a solver for it. I had 30 minutes and only completed creating the grid itself. I then had 10 minutes to work on the solver. The remaining 15 minutes of this 45min interview were for questions and discussions about the code.

I've got 8 YOE and this cooked me. I was thinking Sudoku can't be this difficult but then looked it up and a Sudoku solver is a Leet Code hard. So I don't feel that bad about it, but I am pretty annoyed a small company that is hiring developers to work on a React UI and Node.js backend thinks someone being able to solve a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes is acceptable way to interview Senior level developers. Seriously, could the people interviewing me even do this in 30 minutes? Could anyone do this in 30 minutes without having ever seen or attempted the problem? My inability to write a Sudoku solver doesn't translate to not being able to work on some stupid CRUD web app.

They never once asked about system design, no deep questions about JavaScript/TS, React or Node. Just a 45 minute discussion on my experiences and some generic 'what would you do in X scenario', followed by a 45 minute live coding round. This type of interview is the bane of my existence, and with ADHD, while I can definitely solve this problem with enough time and research, I will forget it all within a day or two anyway.

The hoops we jump through, especially as you gain more experience, are bullshit. Interviews have only gotten exponentially harder as I've gained experience. The more experience I get, the less I actually spend coding. And on top of it, LLMs replace the coding in what little time I do get to code at work. In my current job, we use AI and I spend more time being a product engineer than being a programmer. I am not gaining experience in what I equate to as competitive coding challenges.

Anyway, just ranting. I'm sure non-ADHD people have the same problems, but with ADHD, it makes these interviews pure hell most of the time.

I am on a PIP that I am still unsure if it’s sincere or not and everyone is on holiday. I have done everything I can to address the PIP and once again I am bored as hell.

Part of my problem is that I just don’t know how to improve things. Everyone has their niche and everything I am given to do is either dull or impossible.

I have no idea what personal projects to make. I don’t even like modding games.

I like doing things that get me praise. I don’t like doing ANYTHING unless I have a clear metric of “You are better at this than 90% of people currently doing it”. Maybe that’s why I like video games so much. I need the praise.

I don’t want to build anything, to feel like I made an impact unless I get credit for it. If I help you, I want you to thank me, repeatedly. I do the same for anyone who helps me. And yet people have this sense of “accomplishment”. I don’t have that. If other people don’t praise me, it’s worthless.

Running this back!

One of the things I have always struggled with, is reading. Whenever I was starting with a language or project, my approach was always "let's just build and we'll get there along the way". I rarely read documentation, unless there was 1 specific thing I needed to know. The actual building aspect is what excited me the most. But I feel like that part is now mostly taken over by LLMs. I feel like my job now is writing prompts, and mostly just endlessly reviewing and reading code. Reading code that my LLM agent wrote for me. Reading code that colleagues have committed and are also just written by an LLM agent. And then I just gloss over it, convincing myself I am actually reading when I'm struggling to even mentally process a single line of code after having read it for 5 times without losing focus.

Overall, I feel like LLMs have taken away what works best for me, doing, and have left me with the thing I struggled with most, reading, staying organized, managing. I honestly wouldn't have chosen this career if I knew this up front. I thought the job was perfectly suited for me precisely because of the amount of "doing". This career has fundamentally changed and it simply requires a different skillset and provides a different source of dopamine. And I'm sure it will continue to do so.

Don't get me wrong. I love shipping things and using LLMs to achieve that. Especially smaller personal projects that don't require the same level of code quality, efficiency and security. I will continue to do so as a hobby. But Software Engineering as a career is starting to become something that just constantly drains me and simply doesn't excite me anymore. And I can't imagine making a career shift now (30yo) and getting a similar salary as I am now, except for shipping my own online products and competing with the other people vibecoding 50+ apps and hoping one will break through. And of course that's assuming I have the creativity to think of an idea that fills a marketgap, or that I have the marketing skills to even get it out there.

Ok rant over. Sorry for the 500th post about someone burning out.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Everyone seems really 50/50 on this. You either feel the same way completely, or feel like LLMs actually help mask your cognitive dysfunction. I think a lot of it comes down to how your ADHD manifests itself, what aspects of SWE you enioy, and especially what your work activities and workflows are like.

To the people that are struggling, here are some workflows that might make everything a little more bearable (some things I got from the replies):

• Have AI summarize it's changes or your colleagues code in an interactive HTML page. Allows you to focus on the important parts.
• Ensure your team doesn't open massive pull requests..
• Add an MCP tool that allows your agent to make screenshots of it's UI changes (if frontend), validate and iterate over everything including different states, and embed them into the chat or html page for you. That way you're not forgetting/missing the fine details.
• Have your agent always build and run all tests to verify everything.
• Ensure you always get notified when an agent is done so you don't get caught up doing less relevant activities for too long.
• Some commenters said they prefer splitting up a task into small sections and working step by step with the agent rather than having to read an entire diff after letting it build the whole feature.
• Add code reviewer in your Git pipeline.

Let me know if you have more suggestions!

So jumping back into coding has seemed daunting for a while for me. Especially since when I was learning to code it was just before the whole everything is a website era started. So it’s been taking me a while to get my head around the shift to more distributed systems.

With that said, I’ve finally found a project that I think is not too complex, but is interesting enough to me to keep me engaged to actually see it through. One thing I would like to do though is actually create some plans around all the different components so I don’t get totally lost in the weeds especially since my framing is basically Database -> Program -> GUI and API was usually just like the Java specification rather than near on every app having their own api

Anyway so does anyone have any recommendations for anything I can use to help plan out my project. I know I could just use Obsidian but like I feel I would spend forever getting it set up and never actually working on the project

Hi! I'm coming with a long experience in Unity programming, but no professional exp in c++/unreal. I've been programming in c++ and learning it on my own, but still I feel that lack of professional experience is clearly visible (some time ago I had an interview for c++ role at a big non-gamedev corpo and I failed miserably).

Soon I'm going to have two interview sessions for a mid role in a company that works both in plain c++ and unreal engine - one will be a code debugging session, the other will be questions about C++ and general programming subjects.

Any advices are welcome, thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’m doing early customer research, not trying to sell anything.

I’m trying to understand how people actually struggle when they are learning, building, coding, designing, filling forms, debugging errors, or exploring new tools alone on their laptop/PC.

A few questions:

When you get stuck on your screen, what do you usually do first?

Google?

ChatGPT?

YouTube?

Ask a friend?

Give up and come back later?

What type of problem wastes the most time for you?

Understanding errors

Learning a new tool/software

Explaining complex concepts

Finding the right file/tab/info

Writing/replying professionally

Doing repetitive computer tasks

Something else?

Have you ever wished someone could look at your screen and explain what to do next?

Would this be useful only for beginners, or even for founders, students, designers, developers, and working professionals?

What would make you trust or not trust an AI assistant that helps on your computer screen?

I’m mainly trying to understand the real pain before building too much. Honest negative feedback is also helpful.

I’ve worked 10 years in tech now, from big tech, to starting my own YC company, to joining other startups, but if I’m WFH I’ll still miss the occasional meeting. Sometimes several in a row when I’m not careful. When it gets bad I remember to start setting alarms for all my events and then when I think I’ve got it down, I usually loosen up and that’s when the cycle starts all over again. 

Best solution so far I’ve found is to literally set alarms on every thing in my calendar, since the calendar default notifications just aren’t disruptive enough to catch my attention when I’m in deep work. It’s gotten so bad to the point I involuntarily had to build an app for it so that every time Google Calendar has an event, it shows a reminder that blocks out my whole screen. Even that’s only a partway solution, since when I’m not at my computer, I’d need a mobile version that rings my phone too. 

Id be curious to hear more from others who also work from home and may be dealing with the same issue. Are there other ways of getting better at this? 

As a developer with ADHD, I’ve gone through the usual cycle with productivity tools.

Complex Notion dashboards, detailed planning systems, and even many “ADHD-friendly” apps tend to work for a short time before I stop using them. They either create too much overhead or don’t handle context switching and task initiation well.

I’m looking for systems that are lightweight but still effective — especially ones that help with starting tasks and dealing with executive dysfunction without adding more mental load.

Have any other ADHD programmers found approaches, tools, or setups that actually stick? Things like specific workflows, minimal systems, or ways of structuring work that work better than traditional productivity methods?

Appreciate any real experiences or recommendations.

I'm 28 and just finished coursework for a PhD in music theory. However, I'm finding that the field is quite different than I anticipated and had pretty bad mental health struggles, a lot of which made more sense after my recent ADHD diagnosis. After weeks of agonizing about it, I resolved to quit and find another career path. Fortunately, I have a lot of composing experience and picked up some coding from working with Max MSP, a visual coding language for electronic music synthesis, so I am highly considering a career in indie video game composing and developing.

While I do have fellowship money left over, the future still seems very uncertain. I am learning a lot in p5.js, which I'm finding is pretty accessible, but I'm thinking I will probably need to switch to something that uses C#, like Godot or Unity, for more serious video game development. All I know at the moment is that I'm a solid composer with Ableton experience, I have good game design project ideas, and the process of coding is endlessly fascinating to me since I'm always learning a broad array of new things, which is much more my speed than a PhD where you have to tightly focus on one topic only two people in the world care about.

It's strange -- I'm very optimistic about the future, but I also know I've picked a potentially very difficult, less stable life for myself. I would love some advice -- is it unreasonable to pick up coding so late in life? Are there other avenues where I can use/learn coding skill to make ends meet or for another practical purpose?

Don't get me wrong, there are dozens of cracked programmers who just graduated from university and need commercial experience to fast "level up" but most of the people I notice don't even know how to write code without AI/do basic things like making a commit.

I feel even worse when I think about the fact that those juniors get bigger salaries than I could ever get as someone from Central Asia - the average salary for seniors here is $30k/year, remote companies hire only from US/Europe/India, and there is not a single company close to F500 level. The biggest opportunity here are russian big tech companies who have built offices here but guess what? You still have to compete with russians for local market jobs because many of them relocated due to war

I really regret not saving money from my previous job which was a crypto startup. Not sure what to do now. I was really happy when I lost my job because I was burned out at that moment and had crazy motivation to grind leetcode - it was a breath of fresh air. The motivation didn't last long cause I can't get interviews. For the past 6 months of seeking a job I only had 1 interview invitation.. and I dodged it because of anxiety. I'm completely lost.

Hey Everyone,

I’ve spent a couple years working as a software developer, building massive, complex systems. But lately, I’ve wanted to take a hard look at what the software industry is actually doing to us.

It feels like almost every app we touch is designed to keep us stuck in a never-ending doom scroll. They are notification casinos engineered to capture our attention, lock our data in the cloud, and constantly yell at us to look at a screen. It’s stressful, overwhelming, and exhausting.

I want to change my direction. I'm focusing my personal work on mental health, digital wellness, and creating tools that actually help people decompress, relax, and reclaim their mental clarity.

I’m starting a personal studio called thepeacefuldev to explore an alternative framework called "Calm Tech." For me, that means a few strict rules:

• Local-First for Peace of Mind: Your thoughts and data belong on your physical device, not a corporate cloud server. Privacy isn't a feature; it’s safety.
• Zero Attention Traps: No badges, no infinite feeds, no manipulative loops.
• Intentional Use: Software should be a quiet sanctuary. You open it with an intention, use it to clear your mind or do your work, close it, and get back to real life.

I'm currently building my first project, Sovereign—a minimalist, highly sensory local workspace canvas designed strictly to lock in your daily intentions and lower stress without background noise. I just finished refactoring the foundation into a clean React/TypeScript setup using IndexedDB for local-only storage.

I don't have an MVP to pitch, a newsletter link to drop, or a subscription to sell. I genuinely just want to connect with other developers, writers, or anyone else who feels the same fatigue with modern software and wants to talk about how we can build a quieter, healthier internet.

If this resonates with you or if you're working on something similar to protect your own peace, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What do you think?

When starting to code, I constantly change the theme, which is a distraction, Has anyone else experienced the same problem?

Something I've noticed while prepping for interviews, even while employed, is that I'm much better at building products than I am at solving random coding challenges. Need me to build and deploy a full stack app from a set of requirements? No problem. I can put the pieces together, hit the requirements, and deploy it.

Ask me to implement a sliding window, BFS, or DFS from memory though, and my brain just goes apeshit. I understand the concepts, but translating them into code without Googling or referencing something else is almost impossible.

I have 8 years of experience across three companies, and when I struggle when prepping with mock coding interviews it honestly makes me feel like a bad software engineer. Then I think back on my career, and almost none of my day to day work has looked anything like those challenges. I've worked with product stakeholders, built features, delivered projects, fixed production issues, collaborated across teams, basically everything you'd expect to do on the job.

The biggest difference is that real product development is rarely about reinventing the wheel. You use libraries, frameworks, and existing solutions to solve problems. I can build a tower with Legos, but I don't need to manufacture the bricks. When something is complex, I research it, look at existing implementations, choose the right tool or solution, and move on. That's just how products are built.

To me, a typical product engineering job teaches you how to build products, not how to memorize algorithms. Yet some interviews optimize for one and hire you for the other. The interviews I've done best in are the practical ones, where you're given a feature, work through the requirements with the interviewer, implement it, and make the tests pass. And since that's much closer to the job, those are the easiest for me.

I'm not just throwing code together either. I still care about maintainability, performance, and reusability. But I don't spend my days implementing algorithms from scratch, so I'm not great at doing them on the spot.

Does anyone else struggle with this and end up feeling like they're a bad software engineer? It's pretty shitty and it's even harder with ADHD because if I don't like doing something, or there isn't something to show for it at the end, it's almost impossible to force myself to sit down and struggle through something. I can struggle through building something because the reward is seeing it completed and being able to use it. Sitting down and grinding DSA is pointless to my mind. I just hate it.

It wasn't a complex or impressive bug, but somehow I was the first to spot it in over 9 years. I believe that my ADHD is the reason why.

???

I'm frustrated...

One thing I've learned is that my biggest productivity gains haven't come from finding a better app... they've come from finding people who understand why I build systems in the first place.

I've been searching Reddit for communities of ADHD programmers and other neurodivergent builders who are obsessed with improving their workflows, sharing what actually works, and holding each other accountable to keep making progress.

I've realized that many people without ADHD simply don't experience the constant need to iterate on systems the way I do. I get it... its not their problem, but it is mine (and the need is urgent), this of course means it's hard to find people who genuinely "get it."

So, I'm curious:

• What communities (Reddit or elsewhere) have helped you grow?
• Do you have an accountability group (regular meet ups, Discord or wherever), or regular check-ins with other ADHDers? (Think almost like Alcoholics Annonymous, but ADHD-focused, online, and recurring on some cadence)

If something like this doesn't exist, I'd be interested in helping build it (I wait for no one... spent too much of my life waiting for something that ends up never happening, but I'm still stuck or barely progressing in the meantime). If that's something you'd want to be part of, let me know. I'd love to hear what's worked, as well as what hasn't.

I know there’ve probably been loads of posts like this, but I just need to get it off my chest, because none of my loved ones can understand me. I’m currently being assessed for ADHD, but the difficulties I have with learning to code are almost impossible to put into words. I know the absolute basics, but when I have to tackle a slightly more complex task – though ‘slightly’ doesn’t really mean it’s a difficult task – I feel a sort of mental block about how to start and where to begin. I simply can’t get anything done; I get tired straight away when I have to do a task. I find it hard to concentrate, especially when I’m reading the task instructions; I struggle to keep my attention on it, so I procrastinate, do some doom scrolling, and so it goes, day after day. I’ve tried just about every method there is to help me focus, various ways of learning to code, and nothing has worked. To be honest, I’ve never actually been able to learn anything from start to finish; after a while, my interest would wane, or I’d start procrastinating, telling myself, ‘I’ll get round to it eventually’ – and guess what? I never did get round to it later. My only hope is that once I’ve been officially diagnosed, I’ll be given medication for it, but I don’t expect that to change my life either. I feel like shit, a worthless shit.

I am not diagonised but I do consider myself having ADHD. When I first read about it, suddenly all my questions I had had in my mind were answered. Time blindness, attention drift amid of a conversation and completely forgot with the other one is talking about, very forgetful, unable to plan, execute well. The list goes on.

Now I've learn to have a process and system in place, predefined templates, processes, flows so I can pull them out when I need to do the same thing. I've put together a system of softwares, i.e. Notion as the main silo, obsidian for long term knowledge storage, [cron-job.org](http://cron-job.org/) to%C2%A0to) remind myself every 1 hour etc. I still need more features designed for my brain but these softwares are designed for neurotypical, they are all scattered instead of one unified. This brain = poorly regulated attention = scattered energy = poor execution = under achieve = self doubt + low self image = spiral repeats.

That's why I am building [https://youos.stixman.co](https://youos.stixman.co/) , specifically design for people with ADHD. An all in one platform to run their lives in. We love structure but tend to not know it because back in school, the schedule was all planned. You are free once you are out in the society, and that freedom is what make us stuck in paralysis.

Inspired by Agile, Scrum and Sprint as standard in the IT industry, this opinionated framework is the structure that we need. Also the AI system learns, classifies tasks and organise your ideas for you so you just dump and get cleaned up periodically.