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Comment by overstay8930 | Hacker News Reader

It’s an advantage now if you know how to weaponize it for your purposes. The best dev I’ve ever worked with was an iOS/macOS Swift dev that had horrible adhd, but as long as someone was running the project that helped him focus on what needed to be done (i.e. on his ass enough to keep the work interesting without being annoying), he was doing the work of 5 different people (and was well compensated for it).

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I made it through grad school, postdoc, and got a really good academic PI position with untreated severe ADHD… I can’t do simple things I’m supposed to do or get any work done most days, but every now and then I get hyperfocused on an important scientific problem and solve it. I can’t stop thinking about it until I solve it, and I can get what looks like years of work done in a week. It can take my years to write these up as a paper after. I get paid well but it is stressful as hell when I don’t get any work done for a long time and am worrying about the consequences.

I'm thankful that I'm in a similar position at my current company. For the most part they just leave me alone and give me full access to everything, no jira sprints or anything, and they just let me focus on what I find most interesting which means I'm constantly working on something new and different.

That has allowed me to keep the entire department on the latest frameworks/runtimes (all with automated migrations), migrate our services over to Linux and ARM64, continuously help all the teams with the various issues they may have, and pickup random tasks (such as adding Okta support alongside our homegrown auth), all the while the rest of the devs teams just keep doing their own thing without being affected by this. I think it's good to have someone like this in your department, since they help keep everything running smoothly while filling in all the oddjobs you'd normally have to assign through a more bureaucratic structure.

This was the typical work of a sysadmin before DevOps™ took over. Using perl.

We all just move in circles

I think that's a bit of an incorrect trope. Sure, there are people like that, but that's because they learned to strongly compensate for their issues. As a person with ADD, with significant "Jack of all trades" tech skills, and some experience with medication - ADD issues just hold me back. All the benefits are from learning to cope. Taking away just the issues makes me superhuman... but only for a few days, because meds have their problems too.

What I'm saying is basically: the good performance is from coping with issues, not from ADHD itself. There's a huge number of people who just struggle, that are ignored in this case.

Was his title lead developer who typically helps out a team with any blockers, or was he a lone iOS dev outputting as much work as 5 people? I wonder what a dev with ADHD can do to stand out when they are just beginning a career in tech. I know that working on difficult tickets that nobody else wants to touch can help because you can keep shifting focus to something new, like you mentioned.

Solo dev with deadlines. They were one of those people who also wrote plenty of swift in their free time, so I’m not sure how realistic it is for people who have normal work life balances.

> They were one of those people…

I’m confused. Was it 1 person or a group of people?

They can be used as a single person genderless pronoun.

That seemed rhetorical. I'm hoping it was intended ironically.

OP said:

> The best dev I’ve ever worked with

So they knew the person in real life. Why use “they” when they could use correct pronoun? I’m not native English speaker and it confuses me when people do that.

This hits strangely close to home and i totally agree. I've been a lead developer for the better part of a few years and have found that the nature of it has completely prevented me from committing to work on difficult tasks as there's a constant need to context switch and assist other devs or jump into a last-minute meeting.

I recently got the diagnosis (and medication) for ADHD which has made the world of difference. I've since had an ability to context-switch and focus in a way that I maybe never did until now. I found myself for a long time not even bothering attempting to open my IDE unless i knew that i would have a day void of meetings but now it kind of does feel like a superpower in a roundabout way.

The difference between medicated vs unmedicated ADHD is something that people can't understand.

Like just being able to focus on one task for hours. Easily.

Instead of your brain and attention bouncing between 15 different shiny things and eventually not getting anything done.

EXCEPT when there's a fire and production is horribly broken and you write the script that fixes it while the support team in India is still figuring out who to invite to a the meeting to discuss about starting to fix it :D (True story)

> EXCEPT when there's a fire

I heard a description a few weeks ago - on TikTok, of all places - that perfectly describes this for me:

I'm calm under stress, and stressed when it's calm.

Yea, I had an unconscious habit of waiting until things were on fire before doing anything about them.

Not really a healthy way to live in the end

Or completely replacing the email logic throughout an application with a db backed queue service in order to ensure delivery when the previously configured SMTP direct delivery gets spotty in about 2 hours.

I also have ADHD, I think having someone does this is really important, often times I am not really motivated to do anything because it's super hard for me to lay out what needs to be done which results in doing many things at the same time and exhaust myself, however, when my manager gives me a clear path of what should be done and in what order, I can fully focus on them and usually get things done faster than he would've expected.

Would the increase in productivity not happen to almost all people if they were given the interesting work and the direct support of a good leader to help them focus? At least, I feel a difference like night and day when working on things I am interested in, as opposed to when I am doing chores. This includes thinking about the problem when I am on the toilet, during sports, on walks, on the bus, and so on.

This describes me pretty well. With a team in place to clear the path and keep me working on the correct big problem, I can move mountains. Without that team I just find or invent big problems to solve.

With a good team, results are almost assured, but without, useful results can often just be a coincidence.

>doing the work of 5 different people (and was well compensated for it)

The compensation part is very rare

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