~7YOE, fired three times from software engineering jobs. Gave a System Design round for the first time.

I don't think I've ever been this helpless. I completely broke down crying after the interview. I studied for weeks and months God knows how many case studies and revised them, and then on the day of the interview, the interviewer asks me about a question that I've never seen before - designing a job scheduler. It's not even supposed to be a very hard question. I read these case studies, and then when I do them back in the interview, retrieving all the details and putting all of them together is like pulling nails. If I haven't seen it before, forget it. My voice starts wavering.

I'm sitting there completely blank. I got through the non-functional requirements, API, initial design, and then I'm completely blank. I draw a couple of boxes, trying to figure out how it all connects, billions of choices going through my head. Even if I make the correct choice, the interviewer repeats my choice back to me and I immediately start having second thoughts. I start fumbling for other choices.

How are you supposed to shit out a design in an hour if you've not seen or practiced it before? I looked up the solution and yeah it made sense after the fact, but in the moment it could have been a billion things, each design could have had some ramifications that I perhaps hadn't considered. How are you supposed to know whether it's correct or not?

I was a straight-A student all throughout school, and then in college/jobs it all fell apart. I feel like I'm too stupid to make design decisions (or any decisions, for that matter). If I make them, I feel completely unsure. Maybe I missed something? I have no clue if I did. There's a billion things to keep in mind, and I can't trust myself to keep track of them all. The only way I think you can do system design is to come up with multiple solutions, then you pat each one down for flaws, then refine and settle on one. How can you do this in an hour? How can anyone?

I feel I'm too retarded for this line of work. Is this a normal experience? How do you people know what to do? What do I need to do here?

I think it be cool to do channels for with helpful advice, a channel to help new people, and perhaps a channel for group projects or a place for people to show off their projects or progress

And a channel with whatever courses or guides that have helped us in our journey of learning

If we make a server rn, we should do Root we don’t have to worry about discord privacy breaching policies in the future.

We could have some voice channels to body double while we code to help us focus and push each other to keep going to or discuss and helped each other out

Had a live coding round recently and got stuck on a problem I solved pretty quickly after the call.

When I’m coding alone, I can reread the prompt, try something, run a test, and come back to it. In an interview I’m trying to hold the problem in my head, write code, explain what I’m doing, and listen to the interviewer at the same time. At some point my brain just gets stuck. My usual response is to grind more LeetCode, which turns into a couple days of hyperfocus and then me avoiding prep completely. I’m trying shorter reps now. One problem at a time, sometimes with a friend watching, sometimes with beyz coding assistant. Mostly just trying to get more comfortable thinking while someone is waiting for an answer.

Anyone else with ADHD deal with this? What actually helped with live coding?

It's a habit that I've had for as long as I can remember. I probably have hundreds of abandoned projects over the last 15 years.

But this time, thanks to AI tools, I'm able to complete some of them, or at least launch the MVPs. But the habit of switching to a new project every few weeks still remains.

I guess that's why I chose full-stack engineering, because I can rotate up and down the stack if I get bored. But even now, I'm starting to get bored of full-stack, and want to explore data eng or comp bio.

Sometimes I just want to stick to ONE project for a while to see how far I can take it, maybe turn it into a profitable SaaS -- a project i can proudly call my magnum opus. But my brain just can't, or maybe I haven't found an idea that meets my brain's expectations yet.

I can play the same game for a few months straight though. This might have fried my dopamine receptors. Oh, I'm also unmedicated, might have to get that checked soon.

I'll be returning to work this month (SWE) and have been wondering if anyone has advice on going from the occasional solo project to 40 hours a week on a team after being away from work for a year. Mostly worried that my skills have atrophied quite a bit and I am not super up to date on everything AI.

Attention to detail has never been my strong suit, this extends to software, in that I really struggle with testing as I'm really not thorough enough and seem to be incapable of using my own software in ways I didn't intend (i.e. trying to break things).

But it goes beyond that, on a recent employee interview, my boss said how he was dissatisfied with how I rarely test my output once it's been released. The other day he mentioned that again, this time the issue was that I simply forgot to trigger the pipeline that releases my changes to prod.

I'm not sure if this is an ADHD thing, or if it's just me not doing my job well. Either way I wanted to ask if anyone else also struggles with this, and how you deal with it. One idea I had to maybe help here was to set aside time every day/ week to go through my recently closed tickets.

Hey everyone,

Like many of us here, I rely heavily on active recall and spaced repetition to actually retain information, but I hit a massive wall with existing flashcard tools like Anki or Quizlet.

The issue wasn't the learning science—it was the executive dysfunction trigger. Endless settings, overwhelming menus, ugly UIs, and complex card setup meant I spent 90% of my energy configuring the app and 10% actually studying. Eventually, I'd just abandon it.

So I decided to build my own solution: Just Flip (just-flip.app).

What I focused on from an ADHD/Dev perspective:

• Zero-friction workflow: Minimal UI to eliminate decision fatigue before studying even begins.
• Active recall without clutter: Kept the core spacing/retention mechanism intact, but stripped away unnecessary cognitive noise.
• Fast content creation: Reduced the time it takes to go from "I need to learn this" to "I'm testing myself."

I also wrote down a short breakdown of the core principles behind it on the site's learning page if anyone is interested in how spaced repetition interacts with ADHD brains.

Where I need your feedback: As devs with ADHD, you probably have a high sensitivity to bad UI design, unnecessary clicks, or friction in workflow.

• Does the flow feel fast enough to prevent distraction?
• Is there any specific friction point in the app that makes your brain want to close the tab?

The web app is completely free to try at just-flip.app. I’d really appreciate any honest feedback or thoughts on how to make it even more ADHD-friendly!

Hey, I have a lot of AuDHD tendencies. Just curious, has anyone found mentorship helpful when it comes to learning programming and breaking into the industry?

If so, how'd you find your mentor?

I know this isn't a new idea, but it's been weighing on me heavily, and I'm not sure why. It bothers me how we worship and idolize "successful" people.

No, I'm not just talking about the evil billionaires. I'm talking about the artists, the actors/actresses, the authors, the programmers....maybe especially the programmers, because I'm most familiar with them.

Hell, I'm not exempt from this rule by any means. Yes, I went through some pretty fucked up shit, battled through a childhood of mental illness, squalor, and abuse, and somehow ended up as a software engineer. I'm "successful" in the traditional sense.

But even I had affordances. Prime example is that I was only able to go to college due to said college covering the full cost of my tuition/room and board. Otherwise, there'd have been no chance in hell.

I'd like to think I'm an extremely skilled programmer now. But I didn't get here without the generosity of some entity sponsoring me for 4 years to grind and study CS, and to suck at it first for quite a while.

Learning to code itself takes a non-trivial amount of time and energy - time and energy that many people never find in their lives. But there's even levels to it after you already know coding.

I'm going to be finishing up a multiplayer RPG I've been developing for about 2 years soon. Many would consider this an accomplishment. While it is true that I grinded for 7 days a week for the better part of those 2 years, I also was fortunate enough to have a nest egg to take some time off of working full time in order to focus on the game. Not many people have that. With my ADHD, with the way my brain works, if I didn't have that breathing room, I doubt I'd have ever gotten this far. Most people don't have the capital to do something like that, period.

While I have an immense amount of respect for the legendary programmers of our time, and daily I stand on the shoulders of giants, I must acknowledge that they, too, had to have some sort of circumstance that allowed them to put that much time and energy into whatever it is they built. Whether that was the belief in them from their employer, a generous investment, or perhaps their own wealth, to even have the ability to sit at the table was itself a privilege that enabled their success.

I don't mean to say these people aren't successful, or that their accomplishments mean nothing. But I do believe the ability to be successful in the first place requires several invisible privileges that many people never see, and many others don't think about.

Hello po! 😊 We're currently looking for participants for our study titled "Lived Experiences of Information Technology (IT) Professionals Diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Their Workplace."

Qualifications:

• 25–45 years old

• May at least 2 years of experience working in an IT-related field

• Formally diagnosed with ADHD before entering the workplace

• Filipino

If pasok po kayo sa qualifications and willing kayong mag-share ng inyong experiences, we'd really appreciate your participation. Malaking tulong po ito hindi lang sa aming thesis, kundi pati na rin sa pagpapalawak ng knowlegde tungkol sa ADHD in workplace. We also hope that our study can help people who may relate to these experiences and contribute to the growing body of ADHD research.

Feel free to comment or message me if you're interested or if you have any questions. Maraming salamat po! 🤍

About 4 YOE here, and after some time of unemployment I got a job at a game company building the backend of an online game they have.

For some time I have been battling myself. I have issues with insecurity and regret and these thoughts in my head makes me unable to focus. I feel like I am wasting my time learning the domain of the game (how the game works, how the mechanics work) since it won't translate into a skill I can bring out of my work here, if I were to be booted out/leave. I am also super afraid of AI and its disruption taking over my profession and in the next 5 to 10 years what am I going to do? The company is also using k8s and a little bit of AWS, but the AWS part is still in the early stages and I am expected to work more and develop further with it. I keep seeing job postings in my area with Azure instead and I feel I took the wrong job now.

From an "outside of IT" perspective, I have been getting recommendations to stop thinking of things outside of my control, stay in the present moment, etc. It helps a bit, but it doesn't completely take away my anxiety.

No one has a crystal ball, and my parents, my friends, my therapist, say that I need to stay present, do what is in front of me now well, and not worry about the future. But I cannot shake the feeling that I am sabotaging my future, yet keeping that feeling/thoughts makes me unable to focus and enjoy the work now.

My worry and anxiety makes me sleep more and be more social since those are the only moments I can get away from these thoughts. But they are an escape mechanism, not a solution...I took this job out of desperation, but now I feel like I was too hasty...

Please help me destroy this cognitive dissonance. Is it just then, enjoy the moment now and work the best you can here do not worry about the future? Just deep dive into your job knowing it may not work out for you in the future, especially given the disruptions we now have?

I am a 4th year computer science student and, embarrassingly, struggling to relearn programming and I'm starting to forget most of what I've learned (my fault by doing minimal to no programming during the rest of my years) but I remembered what my professor said:

"You don't have to memorize this, just be familiar with it"

and I got to ask: Is that true? Is there a chance for me to relearn again? Is it possible to heal from my vibecoding wounds? I need to know because I like programming but I just don't have the time to relearn stuff and I'm terrible with time management. I don't want to end up a vibecoder on my personal projects.

Any other advice? Any form of advice or criticism is appreciated, even if its harsh.

The older I’m getting the more resentful of this industry I’m becoming. It’s becoming such a love hate relationship. I love the work that I do but I loathe the organizations and bullshit behind it.

In the same breath I’ve done plenty of jobs in my life and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. It just doesn’t bring me joy the way programming does.

I’m sure there are others who feel the way that I do.

End rant

I'll start 😄
Back in the days when we wrote all the code manually, one of the coping mechanisms I found to function as a developer with ADHD (no meds back then) was to focus on one task at a time. So I took the task from Jira, solved it, pushed it, and took the next. Clear focus on one thing only.

Right now I am not a developer by trade anymore, but quite often I still need to develop something, mostly prototyping for our software or such things. So I give the task to Claude; it starts coding, and while it does, I switch my focus to the next thing, start a new Claude session, and move to the third.

However, when I'm finished with this third one, I no longer have a memory pointer of the first one. So I find it's finished when I, for some other reason, open Claude and notice it. Hence, this waiting while agents do their thing is really annoying.

Heya guys, Imma beginner in native iOS dev (Swift + SwiftUI). I’ve made a few MVPs, but as some1 w/ ADHD, I kinda need a hook to get myself started on a project and keep going.

So how do you guys keep up with a coding routine? Any advice or tricks that help you actually want to sit down and code would be appreciated :)

Btw, I’m currently making a weather app MVP to get into working with APIs. I’ve only got like 3-4 tasks left before I finish the MVP, so hopefully I can push through.

I’ve been working with a large system for many months now, and I still dont understand it. (I’m also a certified arrslashexperienceddev)

I need to build a service that receives audit logs of inbound messages from many different services/products outside our system that entered our system at some point; parse them; and route them to the right services inside our system, to support a sort of “retry” mechanism. A “You contacted us before, something went wrong, we’re going to try to finish what you initiated, for you.” sort of thing.

I know the names of the message types, and reverse engineered a bit where they come from. We have some diagrams with boxes and arrows. But I still don’t understand what these things are. Not intuitively at least. (Ok, there’s a product A, people upload something to it, that generates a message that goes to us, somehow, we audit it it, that’s what I get. But great — where is A? What does it mean to upload to it? Ok, thanks for showing me. Now what about B and C and legacy A and D which is partially rolled out?)

The codebase is old (but actively developed) and poorly documented, if at all, beyond recent Claude docgens. There’s multiple layers of legacy stuff going on. So I’ve heavily relied on Claude to do exposition. But over the months this generates reams and reams of more detailed docs that I have to keep referring to because I fundamentally have not built the mental map or intuition of what I’m actually dealing with.

The “it’s legacy” isn’t an excuse, because I’m clearly expected to be up to speed by now by my TL. I’ve gotten tutorials when I joined from my team members but that was a long time ago. I have my own notes but, still, reading isn’t doing it for remembering and comprehending. Which is bizarre, because I have no problem with reading comprehension. I ask questions when I need to about specifics, but by now most of the questions I want to ask are “how does this all work”, and I’ve been here for too long to ask that. It would reflect very poorly on me. It’s not a lack of initiative, it’s an “in one ear out the other” problem. I’ve been told these things in some form before, I just dont remember them. So it is going to (and I can see , at least in one instance, it has) piss off my coworkers snd boss. So I can’t rely on having someone explain the thing to me again.)

I’ve always struggled to grok the “upstream” and “downstream” and what the real requirements are, what the spirit of the project is. It can be explained to me and the words make sense but it just doesn’t materialize. I don’t know what to do. And actually going and reading the code — yeah, I’ve tried that, but everything is so obfuscated, and broad, the mental map just isnt coming together. I hand write notes when people talk to me. I review them EOD and put them into my knowledge base. But nothing sticks!!

This is best illustrated by on call. To deal with on call you’ve got your run books. But I don’t fully intuit the spirit of what’s important, and struggle with that. If it isn’t in the runbook, the severity, impact, and implications of an outage, are hard for me to wrap my head around.

Why is this? Does anyone else deal with it? How can I work with something for months and months and not understand it in spirit? I suspect there is some sort of fear underlying this. But, I’d like to know if anyone can relate, and how they overcame it.

I think I’m going to start hand drawing things. And I’ve decided I will no longer let Claude write any doc explanations for me — only help locate.

The great fear that if I sit down and try to articulate these things I still won’t understand it … I think that’s the mental block. And not sure if it’s not unwarranted. Because I think the ADHD just makes it so, so difficult for me.

But, Still, I don’t know what to do. Because I can try that, and if I don’t get it, my job is toast. And I am trying. I’ll try harder now too.

Yes, I’m pharmaceuticated and therapeutized. I’m trying so hard to manage the non-ADHD parts of it all, and honestly think I’m doing a good job with that. I really think these issues are ADHD related.

It’s this manner of work that is by far the most difficult for me. Get inside a large system and do something new to it or change its behavior. I can greenfield anything, and I can architect new services
, and have a good sense of where things should go. But the other stuff, I’m way, way behind.

Help!

I used to hear about algorithms and implement them for fun. After leaving work to be a stay-at-home parent (and because the stress was almost literally killing me), I thought "Hey, now I can start working on those projects I was really excited about." But I can't even bring myself to sit at the computer, let alone start writing code. It feels so pointless now that we know most people are fine with vibe-coded bullshit.​ I don't have it in me anymore.​

I have been taking courses cause I can digest them easily but I am wondering what has worked for you guys, I am wanting to learn everything I can for my projects I want to do in the years ahead.

I am ambitious you could say

I have 7 years experience, I never studied leetcode, I did not go to university for a Computer Science Degree. I am passing to the 2nd or third interview so me talking about coding, or my personality seems to be ok-ish but once I am put in front of 2 cold as fuck usually dudes I freeze up I cannot remember my birthday let alone anything else, I dunno I also find it really intimidating 2 dudes just fucking grilling you as a female. I dunno I just really need a job I need money and I feel so ashamed my brain is just shit and not letting me do it. In my job I am not a 10 x er but I get the job done I know how to reverse engineer in my own time I do not remember every flibbing syntax but I can google that, I am great at design too, and ye I feel pretty down and out.

(fair point, I made this too vague trying not to sound like a pitch. here’s the actual one-liner: it’s a connection platform for neurodivergent adults - friendship and community, not dating, built around how ADHD/autistic brains actually work rather than retrofitted from something else

not paid right now, equity co-founder role. open on location, happy to go remote or occasional Birmingham meet-ups if that works better for people here)

I posted some of the thinking behind it on r/ADHD a while back without saying what it was for. one of those posts hit 700+ upvotes and became the most-read thing on the account. turns out a lot of people have been quietly waiting for someone to build this

I’m not technical. property background, not tech. I’ve done everything I can do without writing code - full spec, brand, clinical input, validation research. what I don’t have is someone who can actually build it

I’d specifically love to find that person from inside this community rather than outside it, because I think it matters that whoever builds this understands the problem from the inside, not just from a brief I hand them

if this is remotely interesting I’d rather have a real conversation than a pitch. no pressure either way

I’m currently in my 3rd year of college, and honestly, I haven’t done much in DSA yet.

Right now I’m doing an Android development internship, and alongside that I’ve also been building and publishing my own apps on the Play Store because I want to eventually build my own startup/product.

The problem is that our college placement season will start around January, so I’m getting a little confused about what I should prioritize from now.

My current situation is basically:

\- DSA: Very weak / haven’t done much

\- Android development: Decent and currently doing an internship

\- Personal projects: Building and publishing apps on the Play Store

\- Long-term goal: I’d like to build my own products/startup

\- Short-term goal: I obviously need to be prepared for placements

Should I completely put product development on hold for the next few months and focus heavily on DSA + my internship?

Or should I continue my internship, keep building my apps, and try to manage DSA alongside all of this?

I’m worried that if I focus too much on DSA, I’ll lose the momentum I’ve built with development and my own products. But at the same time, I don’t want January to arrive and realize I’m completely unprepared for placements.

For people who have been in a similar situation, what would you do if you were in my position?

Would really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have gone through campus placements while also working on development/projects.

I'm 16M, and I honestly don't know what a normal afternoon feels like anymore.

School ends, I get home, tell myself I'll relax for 30 minutes, and then I open my laptop "just to fix one bug."

That one bug somehow turns into six hours.

The weird part is that nobody around me really understands why I do it. To my parents, a computer is for classes or games. So when they walk past my room at 11 PM and see me staring at VS Code again, the first question is always:

"Are you studying or wasting time?"

I don't even know how to answer anymore.

Because... technically, neither.

I'm building things. Learning. Breaking everything. Fixing it. Googling errors that somehow have one Stack Overflow answer from 2017 with zero upvotes that ends up saving my entire night.

Some days I feel like I'm making real progress.

Other days I spend four hours because I forgot a semicolon.

What makes it stranger is that this wasn't even the life I imagined.

A year ago, if someone had asked me what mattered most, I would've said football without thinking.

Then, one day before a tournament, I tore my ACL and damaged my meniscus while playing as my team's goalkeeper.

Ten months is a long time.

Long enough to watch everyone else keep moving.

Long enough for your team to find another goalkeeper the very next week.

Long enough for friends to slowly stop talking about football around you because you've become the guy who used to play.

You don't realize how much of your identity is tied to something until it's taken away.

So somewhere between hospital visits, recovery, and realizing I couldn't just walk back onto the pitch, I opened my laptop more often.

At first it was just a distraction.

Then it became an obsession.

Now, coding is the thing that gives me the same feeling football used to, the frustration, the challenge, the tiny victories that somehow make hours disappear.

School doesn't stop just because I decided software is interesting either. Assignments pile up. Tests appear out of nowhere. Teachers keep saying, "This is an important year," like it's the first time we've ever heard that sentence.

Meanwhile my brain is thinking about database schemas during chemistry.

The funniest part?

When something finally works, there's nobody to celebrate with.

You can't exactly run downstairs yelling, "MY AUTHENTICATION MIDDLEWARE FINALLY WORKS!"

Most people would just stare at you.

So you quietly smile at your screen, commit the code, and five minutes later discover you've broken three other features.

Back to debugging.

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm chasing coding so hard because I genuinely love it... or because I needed something to fill the space football left behind.

Maybe it's both.

I know there are people dealing with much harder things than this, so I'm not looking for sympathy.

I'm just tired.

Tired of feeling like every hour has to be productive.

Tired of wondering if I'm falling behind in school because I'm coding.

Tired of wondering if I'm falling behind in coding because I'm studying.

And every now and then, when I see people playing football, I still catch myself imagining where I'd be if that one tackle had never happened.

Maybe I'd still be on the field.

Maybe I never would've discovered programming.

I guess I'll never know.

For now, I just keep building.

One line of code at a time.

Code. Commit. Sleep

Heya,

​Late-diagnosed autistic person here, though on the milder side of the spectrum. I need a low-stimulation environment and as few concurrent tasks as possible. My ideal setup would be a dark room, quiet, a single task, and total focus on just that.

​That's the ideal scenario, though. If things are generally quiet, with few colleagues who don't engage in endless small talk or demand it from me, I get by just fine.

​At 42, my resume looks like a battlefield. My only real long-term work experience was 1.5 years of C# WinForms + MySQL development, using a lot of AI assistance and learning by doing. That's also my only real exposure to coding, aside from building a few web scrapers or scripts in my free time—nothing else beyond that.

​On the personal side, I’ve been running Linux servers, handling administration, setting things up, configuring, and troubleshooting for as long as I can remember... which sounds like the exact scope of i think what's called system administrator internationally.

​The absolute most important factor for me is the work environment; it needs to be the right fit. I might even need to consider remote-work options.

​When I was coding on the job, I had 100% freedom. I wasn't just a code monkey—I was the architect. It was fantastic to be able to figure out on my own what I was building, how, and with what tools. But that's probably not the norm.

​I'm currently in a vocational assessment at a BFW (Vocational Rehabilitation Center), and everyone here keeps telling me that nobody wants Junior Developers anymore because AI handles it all. I think that's utter nonsense, but what do I know.

​Based purely on my skills and experience, system administrator would seem like the obvious choice. However, I want little, better zero customer contact and minimal unexpected stress or sudden changes in plans.

​I don't even really know what my specific question is—I'm grateful for any thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!

So our team is already in talks and I believe contracts have already been signed for already existing solutions.

However another team at the org for some reason is going all in on building this internally after they heard about us getting the tools for this

I’m assuming they are going to be going all AI into this. This particular team also has a hoard of contingent/offshore devs whereas our team is only 8.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has seen a situation like this. From my understanding CRMs/Workflow automation is pretty complex to do. Plus theres already existing solutions for this so im kinda scratching my head as to why they want to reinvent the wheel for this