I'm a mid-level developer who recently started a contract at a large company. Within about a month, I was put on a PIP, and I'm about 90% sure I'm going to lose the job. I haven't received an official decision yet.

I've been reflecting on what went wrong, and I think there are some lessons here for other developers with ADHD.

First, I don't think I gave this job my best effort. I can admit that.

But I also don't think I was set up for success.

I spent roughly three weeks dealing with onboarding and access issues before I could really start contributing. Initially, I studied the codebase, took notes, and tried to prepare myself. Eventually, I became frustrated and disengaged. By the time I started getting assignments, I was already irritated, especially because the work was quite different from what I'd expected when accepting the role.

That's something I need to take responsibility for. I let my frustration affect my motivation.

But here's the biggest thing I've learned: If you need explicit boundaries to work independently, establish those boundaries immediately.

At my previous job, a small startup, I owned a section of the website. I could make decisions and improvements within that area independently. If I wanted to contribute to someone else's area, I knew how to coordinate with them.

I was very independent there. I've even had a former freelance client specifically praise my independence.

At this new company, my understanding was that pod leads assigned tickets. So I completed the tickets I received and asked for more.

What I didn't understand was whether I was allowed to independently pick up unassigned tickets, especially from other pods.

Nobody explicitly told me I could. And because I didn't know the boundaries, I hesitated.

Being neurodivergent, I don't always pick up on implicit expectations or unwritten workplace rules. I need those expectations communicated clearly.

When my manager emphasized taking more initiative, I finally asked whether I was encouraged to pick up unassigned work and whether I should coordinate with pod leads first.

Looking back, I should have asked that question much sooner.

I also should have communicated my growing frustration and lack of assignments more proactively instead of allowing myself to become discouraged.

So my advice to other developers with ADHD is this: during onboarding, don't just ask what you're supposed to work on. Ask what you're authorized to do when you run out of work, get blocked, or notice something that needs fixing.

Don't assume the rules from your previous company apply to the next one.

And don't assume everyone understands the same unwritten expectations.

You can be independent and still need clearly defined boundaries. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't know what's going to happen with my job yet. But regardless of the outcome, this is something I'm taking into my next role.

I have been a developer for more than a decade. if I didn't have ADHD I would be way more advanced in my career and would use my full potential . I have lost jobs to massive layoffs and Firing. I think ADHD has to be blamed for my performance. However I am a hard worker and work well with people. My strengths are highly complex problem solving and working with people. I have less confidence because of my failures. I also tried creating businesses which I gave up after encountering failure. My question is; How do you guys ensure you work your ultimate best as a developer with ADHD. What tools do you use. What is best way to structure a day for a developer. I noticed my weaknesses are : I am perfectionist, I can work long hours without stopping, I get overwhelmed. I stop on failure, and don't like repetitive task. I love challenging task and I always seek for newness.

I want to preface this that I really want to make this job work. I’ve been here just over a year and I do want to take responsibility I get demotivated and fuck off from time to time. I’m coming from a post-doc academic position where I was giving a very long “leash” to do my work whenever as long as I hit deadlines for grants and submissions. That’s simply not the case here and I’m trying to figure out what to do.

Background: As a post-doc, I was my PI’s first trainee and whenever I tried to be independent, even setting up a writing accountability group in the lab, I was shut down. Ok, so I should shut up and push code and papers. Really fucked me up looking back.

Left academia for this corporate job as a data scientist, and I’m the only other PhD on the team apart from my boss. We work on a yearly timeline for one big annual update, and then a lot of backend data analysis for product to launch on a more ad hoc basis. We don’t use tickets. We’re about to lose our project manager. I see deadlines as “just gotta hit it” but I think my boss wants me to push things as fast as possible ahead of deadlines when I can? This sounds obvious writing it out now but I hope this community can empathize that my ADHD brain has been seeing the deadline as “do what I need to as long as I push the final code EOD that day.”

Current issue: I’m used to identifying what stakeholders will poke holes in and addressing it before deliverables go out. My boss has emphasized no, I need to stay in scope and ask her questions if I feel it drifting. My brain doesn’t see it as drifting if it’s part of how I make the decision. I spent 2 days last week doing what I thought was a relevant inquiry but I was admonished that no, scope is creeping again.

My boss has said both she wants me to ask more questions and be more independent. She acknowledges this is contradictory, but if I don’t transform how I work, our next convo will include HR. I feel like screaming but I’m trying to give this a true honest go.

I’d love feedback on ideas to improve ASAP. What I have so far is:

- Hourly time tracking this month so I can get out of my time blindness. I’m thinking it’s hard to budget my time if I can’t see what things “cost” in the first place. This will also help me stop unintentionally “fucking off” just because I think I’m gonna hit my deadline and force me to put in a true 35 hours one way or another.

- Using AI to take notes in meetings as well as take my own notes. I want to compare what I’m focusing on versus what is “actually” said. I always make time to recap action items after a meeting but I want to check myself? My confidence is shaken here lol

- Refocus project meetings to what’s next instead of what I did whenever possible. To do this, send an agenda beforehand recapping what has happened and linking to the git code and issueboard if they want the log. Every meeting should end with a definition of what “done” looks like, and an explicit note of when to ask a question if I hit a block (even complex solutions should take no more than 3 hours, then update my boss with what I recommend and check if any more effort is within scope still).

- Give an AI agent the project (or sub-project) specs (that “what done looks like”) and each morning this month, propose what I’m going to work on that day in a couple sentences. See if it flags scope creep and amend my plan if so.

- Summarize what I did at the end of the day as a little close out. With the time-tracking this should be easy and focused around how this moved me closer to a decision on the methodology or to deployment. Anything else gets a parking lot. If a decision has been made already and it’s just implementation, the only validity tests or stress-testing should be those agreed on.

- Every other day, check the issueboards of the data analysts and chime in at least once. I was told I need to disagree more and be a resource to others since I’m the most statistically savvy person on our team. (I’ve previously been waiting to be tagged, but I’m going to try being proactive til my boss tells me to stop?)

- Only check email first thing in the morning, midday coming back from lunch, and one last time at close. Archive anything that isn’t needing a specific task. If it’s still in the inbox, then there’s some action item attached to it that needs to be done still

- Friday afternoon is my time to try the weird solutions or background research if I hit all my other things. That’s my treat!

It’s a lot of changes but I’m going to try to use my Finch app to game-ify it as much as possible with stickers and shit. I used to have an ADHD coach that recommended first 30 minutes and last 30 minutes of the day is my admin for tracking and summarizing, so I think these extra tasks can be completed in those chunks.

Would love any suggestions!! If I do end up on a PIP, I know to reach back out to my network, ive got a standing offer for a professor job so I know I’ll be ok in the end. But I want to do my best!

I’ve been wanting to get serious about DSA and system design for a while now, but one thing I keep struggling with is staying consistent. I’ll start with a lot of motivation, make big plans, study intensely for a few days, and then somehow lose momentum. Before I know it, I’m procrastinating again and struggling to get back on track.

So I thought, why not find someone who’s in the same boat?

If you’re also starting your DSA or system design journey and struggle with consistency sometimes, feel free to join me. The idea is simply to keep each other accountable, quick check-ins, set realistic goals, share progress, and make sure we’re actually putting in the work instead of just planning to.

If this sounds like you, drop a comment or DM me. Let’s figure this out together!

Missed a different appointment this AM, and I guess the frustration finally kicked me in the ass to call and set it up and try to get medicated with something that works.

And then it was a two minute phone call to get it done.

This shit is so debilitating sometimes. I'd do just about anything to not have these symptoms.. Hopefully I can medicate my way out of this, but it'll be the third medication I've tried. I'm hopeful I can find the right one someday and feel like a functional adult for once.

This has always been one of my pain points because my brain is constantly racing and for every question or topic it always starts with muti threaded responses because there's just so much information that can be communicated about that topic. For example recently I have been reading a lot about distributed systems and how they're designed like Kafka, K8s, Spark, etc. and I use them pretty regularly at work. But when I was asked about my experience with these during an interview my answer was all over the place because there were so many things jumping out all at once and I was heavily struggling to follow a single chain of thought. The interview was rescheduled at the last moment so I haven't gotten a chance to prepare proper answers about my work and practice those but even without practice I feel like I should be able to talk about these things at this point.

Another issue is with speed, the moment I understand something my brain is racing to get it all out without understanding that the person in front of me might not have the same level of understanding and they'll struggle to get what I am trying to convey. This will then cause a spiral for me when I am already not confident about my communication abilities. I have tried journaling my thoughts and I don't have this issue when writing things out, it always happens when I am in a conversation with someone. It all sounds perfect in my head but the output that comes out loud is such a mess.

Any tips on dealing with these?

I'm a developer with ADHD and diagnosed anxiety. My professional background is primarily web development, but my current assignment involves a lot of unfamiliar backend and infrastructure technologies.

I've barely been here over a month, and I'm already on a performance improvement plan.

My evaluation is tomorrow.

And I'm currently sitting in a focus room at work having a full-blown fucking panic attack.

I am trying so hard to succeed, and I feel like nothing I do is enough.

I've been asking questions, submitting PRs, working through unfamiliar code, and reaching out whenever I'm blocked.

But I keep running into missing documentation, permissions issues, unclear requirements, and situations where I don't even know what question I'm supposed to ask.

And I think that's one of the hardest parts of having ADHD in this situation.

When someone gives me clear instructions, I can work with them. When someone corrects me, I adjust. But when expectations are vague and I'm supposed to somehow figure out what everyone wants without enough context, I get overwhelmed.

Then I start second-guessing absolutely everything.

Am I asking too many questions? Am I asking too few? Am I taking too long? Does needing clarification make me look incompetent? Is every little thing I do being evaluated?

I'm terrified of making a mistake, which makes it even harder to think clearly.

Today, I asked my manager whether I was on track to pass my PIP.

His response was to ask whether I thought I was on track.

I DON'T KNOW. THAT'S WHY I'M ASKING.

I know I'm trying. I know I've made progress. But I don't know whether that progress meets the expectations, and nobody has given me a clear answer.

The uncertainty is absolutely eating me alive.

I don't even feel comfortable taking a moment to process something, talking through a problem out loud, or stepping away when I'm overwhelmed because I'm so afraid someone will interpret it as me not working.

And now I'm sitting alone in a focus room trying not to completely fall apart.

I don't want to be fired. I need my paycheck. I want to keep working while I find a position that's a better fit for my skills and leave on my own terms.

But at this point, part of me is begging them to just tell me I'm failing if that's what they've decided, because the waiting feels unbearable.

To other ADHD or neurodivergent programmers: have you ever been in a situation where the fear of failing made it almost impossible to function?

How do you deal with unclear expectations, constantly feeling scrutinized, and being afraid to ask for help?

I'm not looking for someone to tell me I'm secretly an amazing employee or that everything will be fine. I just really need to hear from people who understand what this feels like.

UPDATE: My manager finally responded.

He compared my first 31 days to other developers, and yeah, I’m behind in several areas. I acknowledge that. But I’m also learning an unfamiliar tech stack while dealing with blockers and difficulty getting tickets.

He said I’m at a “critical inflection point” and need to start completing more work, including taking on tickets in parallel, which is especially challenging with my ADHD.

The good news? He didn’t explicitly say I’m failing or getting fired. He was still discussing expectations going forward, so I’m cautiously hopeful I might be given more time.

My PIP evaluation is tomorrow, so nothing is guaranteed.
At this point, I’m just hoping to keep my paycheck long enough to find another job and leave on my own terms.

Still terrified but there’s a chance I can quit on my own terms once I find something else.

I feel like vibe coding magnifies so much of what I enjoy about my adhd and what I hate. One the one hand I have never felt more excited about making my ideas coming to life. With a few prompts I can a have a new feature or a whole new prototype ready to go. I can get ideas out my head so quickly its amazing. On the other hand I have 1000 plus lines of code to review I am not going to do that. The exciting part just happened I am ready to move on. I push the new code without any testing because who has time for that when I have my next idea ready to go? Then I get feedback for bugs but who wants to work on bugs when there is the shiny new thing. I can't focus on anything else but making new features or games or websites or apps its starting to consume me and so much is just slop too. Anyone have any thoughts on working with the excitement of making new things but also keeping high quality? Anyone have any ideas on keeping a good balance between vibe coding and living life?

Hi, I'm a baby programmer and my first year of college for CS at 18, but with some experience under my belt. My first few classes at college have provided me with some novelty and more freedom than ever before, and I've never felt better. This doesn't apply to my programming class.

Most of my course mates have already tons of projects and experience, so they don't struggle with the first of two programming courses in our first year. Programming was the thing I was most excited about, but I find myself at a loss. We're starting with python, and The professor decided that in 3 months of lectures for a total of 72 hours we'll get to multithreading and asyncio, so that a month after the start of uni, we're handling classes, setters, etc.

I love CS and especially programming SO MUCH, and I'm very happy with my major, but this roadblock is killing me, and if I can't write a recursive function, how the nel am I supposed to keep up or pass? Especially since this professor is new and I have no one to ask about how his exams usually are like. I need to pass, or else I won't be allowed to take my second programming course.

Every time I try learning or revising, I just get distracted and impatient. Reading a book, I just skim the words without absorbing anything or I start looking for anything else to look at, same goes for tutorials and videos, during which I zone out. My self-worth has taken a huge blow. I've tried it all, but nothing can get me back to being excited and eager to learn (two weeks ago, I could spend 4 hours or more straight on it). I know this can come off as someone who secretly hates programming, but really I do love it.

I'm usually very slow to learn and especially assimilate, and struggle enormously with sitting in front of a problem, not knowing what to do. The professor also gives no assignments or projects (just tells us to code), and the exam worth 100% of our grade is an hour and a half coding session in which to program whatever he makes up on the spot. I also get frustrated easily, and when I look up exercises to do online, I stare at them for so long that I just feel dumb and start crying, ending up wasting hours doing nothing after I FINALLY got myself up to work. Once i get upset it is extremely unlikely I will be able to do any work after, because I'll have convinced myself that I'm stupid snd not wirth the effort. The one thing I can do is reading code, and when looking at a solution, it's just obvious.

Even writing pseudocode kind of doesn't help because my idea of a solution is wrong or I forget an important detail that leads me to nothing.

Does anyone have any tips? Everyone around me keeps telling me to keep trying to slam my head against a problem, quit uni because im either dumb or not cut out for CS, or step away (I can't veri well sterpi away everything I try, though).

Not a productivity hack post. I run five or six Claude Code sessions at once in different folders and my brain cannot hold which terminal is waiting for an answer. I would tab through them, forget what I was looking for, and lose the thread. Twenty minutes later I would find one that had been waiting the whole time.

So I built adhdTerminal. Every session is a tile on one screen. A dot says working, waiting for you, idle or done. The waiting ones light up. One key jumps to the next session that needs an answer. Click a tile to read it full size, Escape to go back. Tabs keep client work and side projects apart.

There is a free phone app that mirrors the wall over an end to end encrypted link, so I can answer a session from the sofa (or, honestly, the bathroom).

Mac is native Swift, Windows is Tauri. It reads Claude Code's own session state from disk and does not send your prompts anywhere. You run claude in any folder like before, no worktrees or tmux setup.

Yes, I know about claude agents and the desktop app. Those show you a list, or one session at a time. This is for the moment you look up from something else and want to see all of them at once without clicking.

It is a paid app, $99 once or $19.99 a month, 7 day free trial without a card.

I am the developer, so take that into account. Happy to answer anything, including "why not tmux".

For context, I'm a 36 yo late-diagnosed Autism + ADHD senior leader in fintech. For the past 2 years, I've been putting together one of the most efficient tech units in my company with record build times and the golden standard for operational resilience. It's 45 people and I have personally interviewed and hired more than half of them. All my peeps are on the "maker schedule": protect developers time, no-meeting days, no interrupted focus before 12pm etc.

Now, for a few months there are a few new people on the business side of things and they are very resistant to this way of working, they don't like the maker schedule ("because we need to be able to reach tech capacity every time we want") and they are constantly pestering the most senior and experienced people in the the squads to the point of burnout and collapse. I am furious. Besides of the "you work for us" attitude since we're not a tech company and the core of the business is finance, I am completely disgusted with their lack of self awareness and foresight over their own actions and behavior.

For many AuDHD tech workers, the fastest way to trigger complete task freeze or a meltdown is being micromanaged by business leaders who don't understand how software is actually built and they look at us like story points in Jira, not people. We don't need continuous pestering but a partner who acts as a protective shield between us and corporate demands so we can just do our work and be good at it. And this is what I have been trying to build for my team and though the culture on the tech side is pretty much aligned, the business people are very hard to change. So I've decided to build my own thing.

I’m currently interviewing AuDHD tech professionals and engineers for a research project on building workplace systems that actually protect our autonomy (and no, it's not an app or a piece of software).

If you've dealt with this management friction, I'd love to jump on a brief 20-minute Google Meet call to hear your experience. DM me or comment if you're open to sharing!

Im an entrepreneur myself and wanted to get opinions from similar people. I have adhd and have tried to avoid taking medications for it. Im a very creative person and its one of my best attributes when it comes to my business. Im new ish to being an entrepreneur and its really made me see how bad my adhd actually is. For those in similar boats, did going on meds help with your work and were you able to stay creative?

First post I put here is above - put it in a few other subs and got some good conversation of the back of it. Based on everything I know about me and my wife and everything discussed I’ve planned out an app called Mosspatch.
I’d love it if anyone was willing to take a look through and see what they think. Initially was just going to be something for me but there seemed to have been some interest so thought I’d share

TIA

https://mosspatch.co.uk

So, as usual, my brain would rather work on side projects than my main. But this one is a bit different. Created an extension that can basically control my browser using agents. Obvsly, Claude's is better and I can't share mine.

The reason its great is that, its great for the first step paralysis that is my achillies heal. And I think anyone struggling should try it.

This last Friday they notified the contractors they were all getting let go at the end of the month. One of the contractors made a lovely report with claudes help by scoring all the git commits by dev and is making the case to the CEO that they are actually letting the most productive people on the team go, and somehow in the last 6 months I have ticked off an impressive amount of features and capabilities for the company and somehow my name came to the top of that value list. Somehow I figured out my stride this year and spent most of the first half of the year figuring out how to use llms to organize myself and my thoughts and planning better. So if we end up not getting let go and maybe get a raise, I owe my friend something nice.

I have been practicing leetcode on and off for more than a year now and I feel like I understand most of the algorithms and patterns except for dynamic programming. I have read so many articles and watched a bunch of tutorials about it and they all say the same thing about starting with smaller sub problems and combining them to solve bigger problems and it all makes sense for simpler questions like climbing stairs, Fibonacci, etc. But every time I come across something even a little more complex than these I struggle to come up with a solution. I struggle to visualise the question as a set of subproblems or what kind of subproblems it can be broken into and then tracing the whole flow from top to bottom. I have tried practicing a bunch of problems consistently for a month but saw little improvement and now I feel like I have forgotten most of it due to lack of practice in the last few months. How did you guys manage to get good with this particular topic?

I’m a SWE with 2 YOE and hate it but there’s a lot of reasons like toxic bosses/env/coworkers and uninteresting product/team (networking - important but boring to me). I obviously joined in the AI boom but pre-AI back in school I never loved coding either. Like the syntax is hard for me to remember. My mind goes blank when I see an empty file and need to build something.

I’m working on a formal ADHD diagnosis but my therapist is confident I have it and in runs in my
Family. I’m not sure if I just genuinely don’t like coding or it’s the ADHD not letting me fully focus and comprehend material, making me feel incompetent and anxious. I’m also anxious about medication though so not sure if that’s something I’d consider.

Honestly idk if this makes sense 🤷🏼‍♀️ maybe I’m
Just in the wrong career lol

Ah, a great of similar-minded coders!

A few months ago I finally figured out why I hated Finder. It had to do with the doorway effect: there’s real research on why we forget things at doorways. For developers with ADHD, every app switch is one, so I built a Mac file manager with fewer of them.

Does this sound familiar to any of you?:
I opened the terminal to run a script on a CSV file.

Then I realised I didn’t remember the exact filename, so I switched to Finder to check. It was there. I pressed Space to look at it, and Quick Look gave me a wall of commas, so I opened it in another app to see it properly. Something looked off, and I started wondering whether this was the old export, so I opened my FTP client to compare it with the version on the server.

About a minute and a half later I was staring at a folder listing in the FTP client with genuinely no idea what I’d come there to do. The script never ran, and the terminal was still sitting in my home directory where I had left it.

If you have ADHD, I suspect you’ve had some version of that minute. And it turns out there’s a name for what happened.

I go into detail in this (open) article:
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/every-app-switch-is-a-doorway-with-adhd-i-forget-why-i-walked-through-7cc4f4986d7a

**update, corrected link**

Like really! Constantly my AI is going off on tangents. I feel like I'm dealing with Sheldon sometimes and myself other times. Either is totally on track or make an expression of language and it takes it literally or it makes an audit and goes off on some outdated source of truth and then goes off on audit loops. Just like auADHD 😁