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This is exceptionally early days (hours really), and perhaps over sharing a little personally but I found the same things hard and easy that you describe for working - personally I would work either by rapidly jumping between things (becoming the fix-it guy or go-to person for short things, I was totally fine being constantly interrupted because my head is doing that anyway), or working when exhausted so I found it harder to be distracted, or working last minute for deadlines.

I started some ADHD medication today. I have been able to see distractions and just not engage. I've got a bunch of things done. I've been able to cleanly focus blocks of time that I'd drift away otherwise. I do not have music in my head for the first time in *many many years*. I can stop and breathe.

I have absolutely no idea what would or could work for you, but your comment resonated with me and I wanted to help share something that feels like a big change for me personally and hopefully others. I waited decades to ask a professional and I absolutely should not have done that.

You shouldn't be evaluating your diagnosis and the effects of a drug upon it, to the point of advocacy, within hours.

Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it. I was willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that would have to be rolled back if RFK just stopped prescription drug advertisements, which are definition targeted to the weakest people in their weakest moments, but that immediately disappeared from the agenda.

What on earth makes you think you could know what's going on in someone else's brain with such confidence.

Wild.

Likely because of own experience and shared experience of others?

Medication here is not exactly new.

I'll quote Chris Gethard:

...mental health medications, to my knowledge, that’s the only type of medication that when people find out you’re taking it, they feel this freedom to offer up their entirely unsolicited opinions about it, right to your face, it happens all the time...

Like nobody has ever been diagnosed with diabetes and had their ignorant cousin go, “You’re gonna take insulin?” “For now, right? You’ll get off that shit someday.” No one in human history has ever said the words, “What’s so wrong with your life that you need chemotherapy?”

I have not advocated for anything. At best you could say I advocated for talking to a professional, and I do. I certainly didn’t say it would help them (try reading all the words).

> Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it.

I’ve had lots of things that were supposed to help and didn’t. I was told this may or may not help and is the first thing that has made a real difference in decades. Other than taking stimulants before and finding it weird it made me very calm.

I do not live in your country and do not see any prescription drug adverts.

Maybe that's true of some drugs for some illnesses, but stimulants absolutely do just straight-up fix most of the issues you struggle with as an ADHD person, pretty much immediately (as in, they take about an hour to kick in, and then boom). As someone who's taken them for a couple years, it really is life changing, and it's obvious it's life changing within about an hour of taking your first dose.

> Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.

Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it?

(Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)

> Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…

Dammit, now I have to live the rest of my life thinking about that this might be a thing that's actually happening.

Mobbing is probably older than resignation as a concept.

> Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out

This is the norm from what management does to us.

Evil techniques managers use: Isolate the IC. Put IC on a legacy or deprecated work stream. Don’t give IC anything that could increase their longevity. Work politically to get others with you on an empathetic level, such that they understand this person is a drag, in some way that doesn’t make you look frustrated or a poor leader. As a manager, you control popular opinion without the IC even knowing. Micromanage the IC. This is a sure-fire way of ruining any IC.

While what the manager should do is: let the IC do their job, encourage them, foster their growth, and be positive about them to coworkers and others.

i've always wondered why I eagerly jump in to some big tasks whereas others fill me with anxiety and trigger procrastination, and recently I've come up with a working theory:

if the task requires requires leaving a stable equilibrium and moving to another, I will procrastinate. So things like "fixing these bugs" or "build a prototype" are fine, but "migrate this system from X to Y" are a problem.

It's because these are the tasks where you know things are going to get worse before they get better.

When I work, I want to fix things and shrink my to-do list (why yes, I am an inbox-zero kind of guy). These big migration tasks are the type of work where once you start, your to-do list gets bigger.

I tend to like "make the line go down to zero" type tasks (not burndown charts but like "# of integrators with old API"). IMO it feels good to have a solid definition of done and realistically most tasks don't.

This way of working really requires a small company, (and is one of the reasons I think small places have a chance of outsized impact). But at bigger places, either a manager is being judged on a team outcome -> where an individual not on topic is budget not going towards what they get paid to achieve. Or you need seniority enough to work directly with a project director (but most structures expect people at that level to have leadership responsibilities as well).

Unfortunately, while people that work like this can be exceptional, big projects run on organised measurable work. I have found few places big enough for a specific "Manager" role to be flexible enough to get a good match to tasks.

I avoid working in big companies, fighting bureaucracy is not my thing. But ordered-micromanaging-managers do happen even in companies of 10 people. One of the worst experiences like that I had in a company of _four_ people, CEO was just insufferable, we actually spent an hour every day creating a schedule for a day for everyone with 15 minutes granularity.

One thing slightly bothering me is that I have zero problem managing people both like me, and ordered stable focused guys, because I try to use people's strengths and put them on tasks which suit them the best. I've been CTO twice and can speak from experience. The only requirement for me is wanting to be useful in some form, we'll find a task, occupation, or feature lifecycle stage.

And managers who tried to put on me some kind of "personal improvement plan" clearly can work productively only with people exactly like them. Maybe they shouldn't be managers, a lot of good devs have some degree of ADHD, cutting them out or putting them in the box can't be good for business.

I have spent a fair amount of time in very large companies (single projects involving thousands of devs). You end up producing a whole lot of management training (and managers) in this environment, just due to its size.

You end up with not exactly an intentional bureaucracy, but one where the idea of fairness from somehow "objective" numbers becomes a focus.

This kind of works at this scale, because you need to have a way to abstract and reason about the capabilitys of far too many people than you can know individually.

The training and materials don't scale down though, so you get someone trying to apply metric driven performance in cases where it just doesn't fit.

It's generally "ok" for big business, because projects at this scale can survive on rigid organisation, simply because achieving anything at that scale is a challenge enough to be valuable.

Occasionally you see inspired leadership, but every level of management it has to go through erodes it. It's part of why it's so rare for a big company to produce anything unusualy good at scale, it takes a real alignment of stars.

> I'm doing the same, or at least trying to do it.

This post gives me hope as someone with ADD. I have a MTHFR mutation and cross-dominant eye, with a little autism spectrum, psychosis, OCD tendencies, depression, injury, sleep apnea, and insomnia.

I recommend eggs, spinach, potentially fasting, walking, and maybe some kind of fidget device.

I also recommend giving yourself a little slack.

If you’re like me, we don’t belong. We’re pirates when it comes to what’s expected of us. We don’t fit in. We’re made that way. We go all out until we can’t, and then we don’t until we do again. We’re hard on everything, but we care immensely and at the same time, we can’t feel. We exist to be that agent of randomness that does the unexpected thing that saves everyone that one time in a thousand.

Im a fellow pirate and yes eggs, spinach, etc. help me. As does neurally dense music. I no longer have a micromanager boss. My life is better as long as I see a flotilla of non-sense to raid and an idea I get the silent treatment on.

> cross-dominant eye

Is it relevant to the topic of this conversation? Does it cause any effects, either positive or negative?

This is very enlightening.

But I'm curious, why the eggs and spinach?

This is a latent stress reduction mechanism which takes over to do many things which may be located is to relax automatically. This gives a physical we!!being.