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Comment by anthonypz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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