Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
I wouldn’t call it a superpower by itself but I have definitely learned how my brain works to my advantage. Programming is a perfect example, I have found that my brain makes connections that others do not when writing code to solve a problem. I have also found that I am able to work through large complex problems when troubleshooting as well which has definitely been a bonus.
Over the years I have been able to get myself to form habits that make me check my own work or strict work so it’s impossible to miss something. For example, working in and with infrastructure automation etc ended up being a fantastic fit for me because I can hyperfocus and make the automation run flawlessly and then I don’t have to worry about using it because I already know it works.
Definitely anecdotal and might not apply to you but hope it was at least a little helpful. You are definitely not alone either, those types of things absolutely happened to me all of the time when I was in school. Thank the computer gods for version control, code linters, and unit tests 😃
In the same vein, I find that even many other programmers without ADHD find the coding process to be tedious, which is perfectly understandable (a lot of it is just sitting there typing known solutions rather than solving new ones). Somehow, I am perfectly suited to handling certain tedious tasks because I can somehow focus on the task while also being somewhere else inside my head; eliminating the feeling of boredom.
The problem is that I have no control over this ability. It happens with some things and not with others and trying to force it is futile.
Well said, after many years I learned that if I just do what it wants to do then it’s way easier for everyone. I have been lucky (and intentionally worked toward) to have a career that lets me work whenever and wherever I want and management that doesn’t care as long as the work gets done so that has helped a ton. I also have recognized and communicate to my managers that while I do like money it is boredom that will make me quit the fastest so bring me all of the interesting and “impossible” problems and I’ll be a happy engineer hah.
Coding is tedious?
Isn’t that the best part?
Like I make words on screen do things in the magic smoke box and people pay me