Handling ADHD while programming
This is kind of an off-topic question, but I thought some of you might have an interesting point of view / experience, or some resources to share.
I have a friend who is very new to developing and who started working at my company. I'm basically giving him time to learn and teach him a lot about web dev myself.
He is very motivated, but has days where he just can't function due to not being able to focus. On these days no progress is notable at all.
He is very reflected about it, and we have a high amount of communication, but I am not sure on how to handle these situations.
He is 29 btw, so not a "youngling" anymore. So motivation or other priorities like gaming, partying... is definitely not the problem.
Do you have experience working with people having ADHD, and how do you handle it?
Or do you even have ADHD yourself and can give some firsthand tips on how to handle these situations / how to pull yourself out of it / what other can do to help you / ...?
7 Replies
Is getting treatment an option? If not, body doubling can be very effective for some (basically just have someone else physically present who knows you’re supposed to be working)
I am as old as your friend and even with medication it, in my experience, is normal. Rituals / routines / habits are good for bringing up your baseline and you should strive to alter as much about your structure and environment as possible to earn as many wins and mitigate as much friction as possible; however, I don't think there is anything in the world that can make every day of yours great, guaranteed.
Some days you can just do "ok". Some days you will do a whole month's worth of work in a flash if nothing gets in your way. It feels like the air in a lightning storm, the charged particles make your hair stand on end and you glide between tasks seamlessly as everything you had learned quickly and violently snaps into place. You cannot force every day to feel like that, and if you found a way to do so it would probably kill you.
Sorry for the late reply and thanks a ton for your feedback!
@e of pi
He got the diagnosis but no therapy or medication so far afaik.
Regarding the body doubling: We both work from home since we live in different cities, but are constantly in Discord and basically have a "digital office" where we can talk to each other almost every minute of the day if we want.
@EntranceJew
I don't expect him to work every minute of every day like a clockwork (obviously). I never worked like that neither. But I fear a future where he will work on customers' projects, having a low level of reliability, resulting us moving into struggling sutations time-wise. But I am aware that he is he is still very fresh and things can change alot over time.
To give a bit more background info:
Since he is mainly learning all the basics for now, I let him work on an own project he chose. It's pretty much a Bulbapedia clone since we're both big Pokémon fans.
He gets all data from PokeApi, and is free to design all UI and UX by himself (with me giving him ideas for improvements).
He is enjoying the variety in his work doing design as well as coding.
We have a daily meeting in the morning and I try having at least 1 or 2 milestones defined during the working day, so he has short term goals, which works mostly well.
Some specific challenges I noticed are:
1. Him having quite some trouble as soon as things won't work immediately. He does not have a feeling (yet?) on how to debug problems and I'm not sure on how to teach him this better than reminding him of using console.logs to check his context and find out what exactly works as expected and what doesn't. But I can often see his head blocking in these situations, so he won't even make the connection to use console.logs and just being clueless on how to even start handling the problem.
2. Since he tends to forget quite a lot of things I try to encourage him to take more notes during the day, so when he faces the same problem again, he can just check Notion. But he doesn't really realize when he observes something that's worth writing down.
So in both cases what I think might be the core issue is him not "clicking" in these situations and start thinking solution-oriented. And I don't know if that is something he just needs to learn on his own by running into these situations again and again until he gets it, or if I can do something different to make it easier for him.
That said I also need to say it is the first time for me teaching someone how to code starting from 0. I worked as a leading dev a few times teaching juniors, but all of them had a few years of working experience covering the basics of soft and hard skills, while he still needs to learn how to think as a developer as well as even how to work in an office job.
So all of this is just as new for me as it is for him, and I'm not exactly sure what things happen due to "him not getting it (yet?)" or "me not teaching it right".
IME it’s very easy to overestimate one’s ability to remember things. Note taking is a skill like everything else and will take practice to get good at.
Keep in mind one of the things about ADHD is motivation does not work the same way as for neurotypical people. Novelty and deadlines are both effective motivators. So, good job on setting daily goals, definitely keep up with short term goals even on customer projects where those milestones only exist internally
Hi look up "second brain". I like https://obsidian.md for this.
Also the ADHD FTW site. Lots of good articles https://adhdftw.com/articles/
(This site is made by a developer who has ADHD)
He does a podcast too, here is is episode on "second brain". https://adhdftw.com/podcast/your-second-brain/
Your second brain
In today’s episode, I talk about one of the most powerful tools in my ADHD toolkit.
@finite-field Thanks for the resources!
I already knew about second brain. I also listened to the audio book from Tiago Forte a while ago. Really good input. This is actually the reason why I try to push using a note taking while working quite heavily – in my case Notion.
I find the ADHD FTW website quite interesing, maybe even for myself. Thanks again for that! I'll show it to him