Ask HN: How do you manage a DevOps position with ADHD | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage a DevOps position with ADHD

4 pointsmrngilles6 comments

Hi HN !

I'm wondering how you are managing a DevOps / SRE / infrastructure position with ADD/ADHD.

In my experience, it has been quite difficult because a lot of the time, the work makes us wait on pipelines to finish, machines to start, script to complete, cluster to respond... Without talking about the distractions of On-Call, slack messages, and questions from the rest of engineering.

During this wait, I can get distracted, and have a really hard time coming back to the task at hand, even sometimes forgetting what I was actually doing.

Do you have any good strategies for dealing with that ?

Thanks !

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Some actionable advice:

Write down what you are doing and put it somewhere within your field of view. I use notepad in the corner of my large monitor. When you forget what you are doing, look at this.

Set a timer for each task you do. Keep it short and make sure it has an audible alert when it's done. When you hear the alert, double check if you’ve gone off task. Look at your note to remind yourself of what you are doing and then get back on task.

If you know what the task is, hear the reminder to get back on task and still don't get back on task, you need emotional tools. This is beyond a single post, but look for a therapist who can help you with the emotional side of ADHD.

> If you know what the task is, hear the reminder to get back on task and still don't get back on task, you need emotional tools. This is beyond a single post, but look for a therapist who can help you with the emotional side of ADHD.

What do you mean by emotional tools ?

Anything that deals with changing your emotions to improve your ability to get tasks done, rather than just organizational tools (calendars, planners, todo lists, apps).

This includes but isn't limited to, CBT, mantras, positive self-talk, body doubling, breathing techniques.

At the end of the day, no calendar, todo list or app can make you do a task. If you're getting the reminder, in the right place with the right tools and enough time to do the task but you still don't do it then the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe you feel too anxious or overwhelmed. You need tools to address those problems, not just remind you what you need to do.

> Do you have any good strategies for dealing with that ?

Instead of thinking of that as the "problem" -- maybe it's an "opportunity".

> During this wait, I can get distracted

Well, great! Fix the wait. Ask the questions during the wait. Why does it take so long? Can you optimize it? Can you fix it? Can you run it in parallel etc...

I don't think there has to or should be a long wait. Most infrastructure builds, CI/CD etc are bloated, unoptimized and take too long for no reason.

> I don't think there has to or should be a long wait. Most infrastructure builds, CI/CD etc are bloated, unoptimized and take too long for no reason.

I completely agree with you on that. However, the wait time is usually not enough for me to really switch tasks for an other "productive" one, because when my pipeline is done, I would just need to switch back, and it really would make it painful.

The option I see about that however, is jotting down ideas for testing later. But then you need to get the time for this optimization, and the optimization will also require you to wait while you test if the result is better.

I know that there is not silver bullet, I'm just trying to make the situation better for me and others in the team

> Instead of thinking of that as the "problem" -- maybe it's an "opportunity".

This reminds me of that meme where the hero have an alcohol „opportunity” ^_^

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