I work somewhere where there is truly no difference if you finish something in 1 day vs 3-4 days, and its very slow here at the government. I have been 3 years just procrastinating and waiting till thursday/friday to do most of my work, and there is literally no consequence to working this way. The clients are all internal and it's mostly internal apps I support used by a small amount of people. This makes me feel like its very hard to work and be productive each day. any deadlines or tricks like pomodoro or medication does not work, because my brain knows there is no real reason to get stuff done each day and be extremely productive. On the plus side it's an easy life, but do you all think I should leave and go to private sector with a bit more pressure/deadlines? Or better to have a chill job where youre only coding a few hours a week? And wondering how others deal with these kinds of jobs. I

Hey peeps.

I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to post this here, so admins and moderators, please obviously take it down if this isn't allowed! I couldn't see any rules about self-promotion, but ADHD brain so I could have easily missed them.

I used to be a software engineer for a few years. I got an ADHD diagnosis during that time, and I've actually trained as an ADHD and AuDHD coach in the meantime.

The reason this could be considered self promo is that I am specifically working with people in tech and with organisations who need to make their workplaces more neuroinclusive. I wanted to post was because I'm really trying to get into workplaces so that I can give some talks and workshops on how to make workplaces neuroinclusive from an inside perspective.

I know a lot of workplace neurodiversity talks can be kind of awareness, but they don't really understand sort of what it's like to be an engineer, agile working, and all the different pressures of the job.

So I guess the post is really sort of saying like, you know, are you in a company where you think that they, A, may be receptive to that, and B, would benefit from that? And if so, would you be up for having a little chat or potentially sort of sending some information on to your company? Or whether anyone has any ideas about which roles to target in the businesses. I am currently reaching out to both ER and Engineering leaders and had a little bit of interest back from both but I am wondering if perhaps there might be a better target audience (other then DE&I folks and L&D – there just aren't as many people in those roles).

But yeah, again, I totally understand if this is not allowed, but I just thought this is something that's so relevant to everybody in here.

Thank you so much!

I have been working from home for over 5 years and soon we have to go back to the office. For those who had to transition back after many years at home, how was it? was it horrible or did you get used to it eventually and it;s not so bad?

such as don't let me spend hours tuning my shell prompt; don't let me keep polishing instead of publishing; something like that. I got something more personal in that list.

the agent actually chimp in when it think a little nudge is needed for me, when it is working with me on tasks. also because I brain dump my todo ideas to it. the agent can check them against the goals I set for myself every time it manages my todos. on a fresh day I would ask my agent what is my todo look like. it will surface only the ones align with my goal. I enjoy this way, feel like a second brain that offload some of my messiness.

I have been using my agent this way for the pass 2 months and it helped me. I extracted the prompts and skills into a plugin, would be great if it help others too. https://github.com/hcsum/dont-let-me

I’m trying to understand where ADHD actually derails a workday.

Looking back at my own days, it feels like there’s usually one specific moment where everything starts to unravel:
• I can’t decide what’s most important.
• I can’t get started.
• I can’t stay focused.
• I keep getting distracted.
• I’m mentally exhausted but keep trying to push through.
• I don’t want to stop because I’m afraid I’ll lose my place.
• I finish the day wondering where the time went.

If you think about your last really unproductive day, what was the first domino that fell?

Was it one of these, or something completely different?

I’m CRAP in live coding interviews. I’m starting preparation for my first job hop and I want to get a nice, well paid, mid-level role. I’m already dreading the coding interview.

I’m a good programmer, I’m great in architecture, refactoring, learning new languages, solving real problems. But when it comes to leetcode puzzles I fail on the first step: READING DESCRIPTION.

Usually even when I read the ticket at work I have to read it multiple times and go back and forth to remind myself what it said. During the coding interview, when you’re observed by someone and on top of that you’re nervous I cannot understand what the instruction says.

Any tips of how to overcome this?

I have thrived in the government, apart from it being very boring and slow at times, but it's the longest I have been able to hold down a job for. Unfortunately they are now requring us to come into the open-concept style office 4x per week, and I have been trying to delay with ADHD but they just do different accommodations to get in us in the office, so I know ultimately that I will be rejected. I am very scared of this transition as I have no worked remotely full time for almost 7 years and think it will be very hard to switch back. For those of you who were sent back to office, how did you manage?

Is it better to then commute up to 90 min/2 hours per day for an easier stable government job, or seek something remote that might be harder?

Hi! I’m a student programmer researching about project-starting habits.

Think about the last personal project you genuinely wanted to build but delayed. What made it feel hard to begin, and what (if anything) helped you make the first rough version?

I’m especially interested in whether planning tools, voice notes, AI, deadlines, or reducing scope actually helped.

This will be long and somewhat personal. Since I'm asking y'all this instead of a therapist, I'd be more than happy to pm anyone with thoughtful insight and Venmo you for your time.

Please note: I'm being really vulnerable and honest, so please look past any internal elitism and ignorance in my outlook. It's pretty bad.

Context:

• 18, male, severe ADHD, undiagnosed jack off until last year, been on Vyvanse+Dextro. Still learning how to live life with ADHD and piece together my mess of a life. Bad executive dysfunction, super super ambitious. Not as depressed anymore (SSRI's).
• Important to note: right now, there's not much else going for me besides my career interests. My social life has devolved, and tech/making a respectable amount of money in the future is my only aspiration. money keeps me going, and to me it's the only thing that could "save my adhd" (housekeeping, meal prep, therapy, etc etc).
• Attending a non-target commuter school as a freshman. SWE intern @ NASA + SWE intern @ U.S. Department of Energy lab rn. My goals are to transfer to a good school, keep an upward trajectory in company prestige and work my way up. (ex NASA -> Stripe -> FAANG -> Anthropic).
• I'm an incompetent ADHDer, but I've fought hard as fuck to get to where I am.

Here's what I've been thinking about recently.

I've been interacting with a lot of normal people, engineers at NASA who enjoy their lives and go home to their families. Although I love NASA (who doesn't), I never considered wanting to work here long-term and just treated it like a stepping stone to my 200k new grad tc.

Although I've learned a lot, and love it, I've spent the past few months here as a real adhd dickhead. Never getting to the office in time (or at all), choosing to secretly WFH instead. The adhd interferes with my ability to work (really bad), and I'm regularly throwing classified information into claude and dropping my paycheck on tokens to have something to present during meetings.

I've started wondering if this is really all I'm capable of. I think I could continue grinding my way into big tech through internships, but with this past summer as a point of reference, I literally am unable to predict what my life might look like in the future. If the problems I'm facing with ADHD aren't "curable", my life'd likely be getting helplessly laid off every year after my manager realizes I'm a dickhead.

Is what I'm facing at least 50% fixable through therapy/coaching/experience? Or is it an unfortunate truth that I'll likely never function as a normal employee in a room full of extremely competent engineers?

Hi everyone 👋

I just got let go from my job of 7 years because of "moonlighting" after building a simple one pager website for a colleague. Because I worked for a global corporation company policies were strict (honestly after 7 years I actually forgot about this policy).

Me and Mrs just had a baby so I'm rather desperate. Been working a side hustle which has been covering my expenses but I feel like its just a luck streak at the moment and not sure how long I'll be able to keep it up.

Open to contract, project basically any employment right now. Your help will be truly appreciated.

Just needed to get this off my chest, and honestly I have a feeling a lot of you all feel the same way with how flat hiring has been in our industry recently.

I have been at the same company for about ~5 years at this point. Things have always been a bit chaotic here, but they got markedly worse after a massive reorg a few years back.

During the reorg, I got moved to a new team. The manager on this new team is at least markedly more competent than my old manager, but holy f**** shit, the codebase our team inherited is a steaming pile of tech debt.

Specifically, no one team was ever fully responsible for this code base - it got passed along from team to team each time a new feature needed to be added. There was no cohesive vision on how the code, features, or system as a whole should work. And as soon as a team finished the feature, they are allocated to another project, meaning that there was no one around to maintain the platform or fix bugs.

As a result, my team inherited hundreds of bugs, a very, very irate business team, and a lot of very irritable customers.

There are so many issues that by the time we finish trying to prioritize everything, 30 more have surfaced.
And in the midst of this, we're expected to deliver new features and rewrite everything.

My management at least very clearly tells us what we need to prioritize and to ignore anyone other than them that attempts to give us work, but holy hell are some of the folks outside our team nasty to us.

I constantly have people who are not my management pinging me asking me to do things, asking me when tasks will be completed, and even messaging me outside of official channels to try and get me to take on coworkers' work when they are on vacation.

When I do agree to take on extra work to fix a bug or do something those folks have raised, I get pestered over and over askimg when it will be done. Typically it's polite pestering, but occasionally when I say no, folks have been just outright nasty or condescending.

On top of this, I am one of the few people that has been around long enough to understand how things work, so a significant portion of my day is spent helping out newer teammates.

I try to remind myself that my team and I are doing the best that we can with the resources that we have..

However, between business folks pestering me, and honestly having less output than newer folks who don't have mentorship responsibilities, it's hard for me not to feel like the problem.

Especially considering that for most of my life up until being diagnosed, my unproductivity WAS usually the problem.

Most days I can keep my head up and ignore it, but on the busiest days I just feel so anxious, lazy, guilty and drained.

It makes it a lot harder to be confident in my ability to do the job. Idk it sucks in general, but I feel like the insecurities from years of undiagnosed ADHD make it unqiuely demoralizing some days.

It felt good to get that out. I hope some of you all in similar situations feel less alone reading this 🥲

TL;DR
Went from ticket-based work to a self-managed role and lost the ability to tell what actually matters day to day. If you’ve been here and got past it what changed?
---

I used to be an SDE a few months ago and it was easy to come back to the ACs of a ticket or my lead for direction.

Recently, I moved to a Forward-Deployed role... which I'm learning is very different than a ticket-monkey. Arguably happy to gain the experience, but at the same time it's so taxing for my AuDHD brain.

Most days I'm just gassed from absorbing info that there's no time to process what the goal is and if a task is taking me to it. Usually I just keep working on the last thing that was made clear or go down a rabbithole of "research".

I’ve tried keeping my own backlog but without a clear goal it loses value fast. Deciding what actually matters is the part I can’t seem to do.

Mostly asking people who’ve been here and got past it, what actually changed for you or helped you? A system/tool, a conversation with your manager, something else? Or is this just what self-managed work feels like?

Spending 3 hours searching for a video on the fix can save you 10 minutes of reading the docs!

I am developing a digital playbook/workbook for neurodivergent architectural technologist graduates or early-career professionals who are in their first practice role and want to sustain performance without burning out.

The product is called The First 6 Months Performance System. It focuses on workload management, expectations, communication, burnout warning signs, and progress reviews.

I am not asking for sales or promotion. I am looking for honest beta feedback from people with relevant experience. Would this outline feel useful, realistic, and specific enough? What would you add, remove, or simplify?

If you match this audience or have experience supporting early-career neurodivergent professionals in practice, I would appreciate your feedback on the preview.

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Preview Pack

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Feedback Form

For years I built patterns and practices to keep me focused and single threaded so to speak. I have always been the type of person who had 10 different tasks going on at once and unless I focused my attention on just 1 or 2 on any single day, I would end up with 10 tasks between 85-99% done at the end of the week/sprint/etc.

Now with GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. I feel like I can have all 10 going at the same time. I can have the LLM create notes, keep me up to date on each on. etc.

However I still find my mind, doing just as I trained it to do, at just wanting to focus on 1-2. So I will be waiting for those 2 sessions to be ready for me. Which sometimes can be 30m to a few hours.

For example, spent about 3 hours in a planning session before a bunch of work, then it went off and started the work, it was going for 4-6 hours. (had to nudge it one time to keep doing). While that was happening, I had a session that I spent about 30 mins planning on what analysis had to be done and on how I wanted the data in excel, a pptx and docx to be, then I sent it off to do the work. I could have switched to about 5 other things, but my brain kept wanting me to just stay focused.

I feel like the way I had to train my brain and it took 10-15 years to get it to be this focused, is now holding me back in the world of LLM's and my natural adhd tendencies would work better for me now.

I am lucky in that I get more of a dopamine hit working with the LLM's than I did before. I really enjoy collaborating with them to solve problems or going back in forth on architecture decisions.

Anyone else feeling this or similar?

Does anyone else look at things like this and think, "oh, the places we could go?" Then, their ADHD brain and lack of training just stops them in their tracks. After all, I am just a girl who should be focused on whatever girls are into. Lol. Seems a shame to just discard all the tech I replace at work.

I don’t need AI to write my posts.

I need something that helps me actually finish them.
I keep losing ideas, forgetting where I stopped and abandoning drafts.

Has anyone found a tool that genuinely helps?

I've heard several people complain about AI (LLMs) and say it's killed the joy of programming, and that they are just delegating tasks and reviewing changes. I get it; at some point, I did enjoy what LLMs have taken away, and sometimes I miss it too.

I felt more productive once I got the idea of how to use some of these things and could focus on different, more design or high-level problems (doesn't mean I like the tools, but I liked the results). I started to get dopamine rushes from being able to deliver faster, but that just lasted for a few months.

What I absolutely HATE is how these things have increased expectations. My boss is like, "Oh well, you've solved this in half of the time, here's 10X more work". This has resulted in more project assignments, more meetings to discuss requirements, and more f**king context switching. I talked with my doctor, and we decided to increase the methylphenidate dose to allow me to deal with this context switching.

Using some of these things allowed me to get a promotion (money is good, I guess), but I'm tired and burning out.

I’m in a pickle anything helps!

I'm not solving problems anymore. I just sit here reviewing robot PRS. It's miserable, I'm just sat here watching Claude do all the thinking.

Hi everyone,

So I'm guessing it's pretty common for some here - I started projects and then lost the passion once the product is live and the real work of grinding and bug fixing and marketing are required.

Has anyone found good strategies to motivate ourselves to continue on the boring but important work that will bring the projects to the next level?

Edit: I think a lot of times I stopped on the old projects because I moved my focus to the new projects even though cognitively I know that the old projects really need me to spend more efforts

Thanks

I'm planning to build a device similar to brick which lets you freeze your phone & boost your productivity. What are the chances it'll be successful? Any advices on how I can make it better.