Anyways definitely seek a specialist, there are many options and even if it's not ADHD they've got access to a lot of really great resources to cope with what you do struggle with.
This is one of the reasons why I will refuse a job title that is greater than senior engineer. I know in my heart of hearts that being a staff or lead engineer will be bad for everyone. I'm not even particularly stellar as a senior engineer, but I can at least sustain it.
Reaching this point can be astonishing to the undiagnosed ADHD programmer. For the first handful of years into their career, their shortcomings were either dismissed as inexperience or covered for by coping mechanisms. In my experience, the coping mechanisms start to buckle once you're a senior level programmer.
Get a diagnosis ASAP if you suspect you have ADHD. Medication and other things can definitely help. I also think there's nothing wrong in figuring out just how much mental capacity you have to give to your job and not exceeding it, even if that means rejecting prestige.
It's frustrating and makes me often give up. I work in Ops, so it's not a day to day thing for me to write any code. Thankfully with all of the fires and different things to work on in Ops I think it's a very good fit for an ADHD person.
Ops I think can be great for this personality type. But it really depends on the exact ops job, and the person in question. Some ops jobs are more flexible than others, and I think flexibility is really what matters the most. I was an extremely productive sysadmin when I did that as my dayjob, but if you asked me to show up during any block of 8 contiguous hours we were going to have a bad time. If I could randomly show up at 3am to hack out that task I just remembered it was a great fit, since you'd get far more work out of me overall.
Debuggers or things like Sentry and Honeycomb. Basically everything that gives me runtime insights to the software.
Using static types and tests to ensure every dumb change I make gets caught somewhere.
Yes, I'm rejecting well paying jobs constantly because I couldn't bear to be employed and working 40h a week again.
We think differently, and tend to value others with similar "differences". The trick is avoiding an ADHD/Aspie monoculture. You need some people around to do the important, but less shiny stuff.
Can't concentrate on boring things - surely that's normal? It feels like they're casting the ADHD net wider and wider and from reading the internet I'm starting to question whether my behavior fits into the ADHD category. And part of me wants it to so that I have a label that explains and excuses me.
But how do you separate it from this boring hyper-specialized world of bullshit jobs? As someone said it's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. I love Doug Stanhope's take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKyMvjPJdtM
It's not that I think "Well, this is boring, I won't read it!"
It's like I want to really read it, suddenly I'm on Twitter, Reddit, 9gag, IG, etc.
It happens in a matter of seconds to minutes and I don't even remember how I opened an app/website.
I can dampen this effect a bit by blocking websites and uninstalling apps, but then I zone out in my mind and don't remember what I read.
I'm not saying ADHD isn't real, just that environment-induced distractions aren't it.
The idea being, social media and the like became so bad in the last 10 years, that there is no functional difference between inherited ADHD and acquired ADHD. The only difference is that the acquired one might be curable.
However, at that point it becomes hard to do anything else before finishing that book...
Neurotypical people can get stuff done even if it's of no interest to them or if they find it boring because it has to get done regardless. I've certainly had the experience of assigning something to an intern or trainee that's super boring and they just knock it out, even though they could care less about the subject of task itself.
People with ADHD have lots of difficulty with tasks or subjects that are not of interest to them, which leads to procrastination. They often wait until the last minute (often it's those people who say "I'm good under pressure"); if the consequences are serious enough, that causes them to focus on getting the task done. Pulling an all-nighter to get that report done doesn't scale and it means something else important isn't being attended to.
Dr. Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscientist) has an excellent podcast about ADHD [1].
[1]: https://hubermanlab.com/adhd-and-how-anyone-can-improve-thei...
It not only doesn't scale - you develop a resistance. Because you managed to pull it off with that all-nighter, next time you won't leave it for the last 12 hours, but the last 8 hours instead. If you still manage to do it, then next time you won't be able to get to it until it's 6 hours till the deadline. And at some point you start to fail. At the beginning it's not a big deal, as you were always delivering and everybody fails sometimes - but that only makes you even more resistant and eventually, it becomes the norm. You fail hard.
Of course this is simplified a lot - it's not "next time", it may happen over the course of several years, get better and worse periodically, etc. But that's the trend anyway.
It's easy - most people can just decide that they're going to do the work they need to do even if they loath it. They won't be happy, but they'll do it. They may even actually be happy if they're compensated enough.
Other people cry into their pillow hating themselves because they can't manage to do simple things they have to do just because they aren't interesting enough, even though they try hard and may wreck their lives by not doing them.
Not if it happens 24/7 across work, hobbies, and remembering to go to bed on time. (This is about struggling at work with ADHD, but it's more often possible to succeed at work and neglect everything else.)
And "bullshit jobs" are a fake concept. Just because a guy wrote a book saying he doesn't understand a job doesn't mean it's not useful to someone.
I dropped out of high school after moving from private to public, since it was utterly worthless and a waste of my time. I logically knew I could just stick it out another 2 years and party, but I literally could not force myself to wake up to do it. I contemplated suicide over this, so it's not something I was taking lightly at the time or not caring about. I ended up just taking the GED one day on a whim.
Then I went on to have a somewhat successful career. It took me years to realize/internalize I'm not just lazy - something is different about me. Very few folks in my peer group could keep up with my work ethic once I found things I was interested in. For me this doesn't mean I only do the "fun stuff" - it means I need to see results of my effort, and those results need to be meaningful. I also need to work on things with a definitive "end" to them - not a never-ending project that won't see a single real-world result for years.
I describe it to folks that I am literally allergic to busy-work. You could offer me a million dollars to do some busy-work task for a month and I already know I'd fail at it before I started.
If the consequences or rewards are large and immediate enough you can kind of "push through" it - but if it's some concept of a future consequence or reward the brain simply decides it does not care.
This is all pretty difficult to nail down I think because I'm simply describing what other folks have certainly felt to some degree. The difference is I don't know many folks who will trade weeks of mental anguish and lots of money to avoid doing a 30 minute task.
That said, lazy often looks pretty damn similar and it's easy to have an excuse on hand.
You nailed it here - anticipation for results is one of the greatest motivations I can have. If it's not there, things get really hard. I don't think it can be sufficient on its own, but it sure needs to be there.
That said - some kinds of what's essentially busy-work can be pretty rewarding in this regard too. There were periods where I caught myself doing plenty of non-creative and rather trivial distro packaging at work just because it was providing me with a quick feedback loop. It wasn't interesting or challenging, but a meaningful chunk of work could be completed before I got bored and seeing it done was rewarding enough to keep going.
Normal people can concentrate if you pay them money to concentrate. ADHD people can't concentrate with such incentives, they are people who require intrinsic motivation to concentrate and money/other rewards aren't enough.
Every single one of those books hit a point where they stopped being something I could read. I don't know why. The subject still interests me and there's more to learn. I know I should finish them, I consciously want to finish them. And every time I think about sitting down to finish them, my mind will come up with a thousand other things for me to do instead. And it's not just all "interesting" vs "not interesting". My mind will decide that cleaning the dishes, filling up the car or sorting through and deleting all the emails older than 7 years is something more important than finishing any of those books. I assure you the topics of those books are vastly more interesting to me than any of those chores. But for some reason my lizard brain has ranked reading and finishing those books below even the chores.
I finished one such book in the last 10 years of my career, and I only did that because I made finishing it part of a annual goal / metric. And even then it took until the last month of the year and I had to dedicate a fixed time every single day where I forced myself to sit down and read a fixed number of pages no matter what.
That's more than just "can't concentrate on boring things". Those topics aren't boring. Reading isn't boring. The chores my head will convince me to do before reading those books are more boring. And yet those books will remain unread, at least for years, and if past performance is indicative of future behavior, for the rest of my life, because it's impossible for me to sustain the amount of focus and sheer determination it would take to finish those books they way I finished one. Unless and until my brain moves them up the "importance" list, they will forever remain yet another thing I've started and never finished.
And it's not just a "maybe you just find reading non-fiction really boring", it happens with other forms of media content. John Winans (John's Basement on YouTube) has a series he's been doing on building a Z80 computer from the board design up. Massively interesting stuff to me, a subject that I've always found fascinating, having grown up after the home brew computer generation and never having gone into hardware even though I really want to know more about it. The original video dropped over a year ago, and at first I was following with each new video and then one day my head decided this was no longer a priority. He's made 54 videos so far and I've made it through 22 of them. I have a tab with the playlist open. That tab has been open since last year, and the last one I watched was 2 months ago, before that it had been another 3 months and 3 more before that. When I finished the last video, I wondered why it had taken me so long, I was really enjoying it. And then I have't been able to get my head to want to start the next one. I've watched multiples of hours since of other videos. I've had days when I was bored or sick and just watching whatever dumb content caught my eye. The list was there there the whole time, and I never could get myself to keep going. Again, I can't explain why, there's nothing boring about the videos, they're certainly more engaging than a lot of content I've watched since I watched the last one. But the list sits there, more videos get added, and the longer I go, the more the act of watching the video feels like an insurmountable boring chore that will take everything I have to sit down and do, even if I know I'll enjoy the content the entire time.
I've mentioned here before I started ADHD meds for myself after the pandemic started. That was the fist time in decades of living that I had ever been able to think about something I wanted to get done, decide I was going to do it and then do it without going through a process of fighting myself into it. It's probably the only reason I've watched the 3-4 videos I did manage after my brain decided they weren't a priority any more.
And all of that self struggle and fighting is for things that I don't consciously think are dull or boring. It's worse for things I do. Imagine a task that you have to physically and mentally psych yourself up for. Maybe it's going to the doctor for a physical, maybe it's visiting family on holidays because they're party green and you're party yellow, maybe you're trying to get in shape and it's going to gym or waking up at 5 AM to go for a run. Call this your big hurdle. Now think of all the things in your daily life that are "boring". Making food, washing dishes, putting them away, washing laundry, putting that away, filling out TPS reports, documenting changes, making appointments, cleaning rooms, paying bills. Imagine that the same effort and energy you have to put into your hurdle also has to go into any mundane "boring" task that isn't in the top 3 things you'd rather be doing right this moment. That's so much more than "can't concentrate on boring things", and so much more exhausting.
I'm undiagnosed, but have already made an appointment after reading a similar topic on reddit earlier this month [1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/z1usgt/advi...
Or if you think about your thoughts calmly, at a distance, what pops up?
When you try to imagine let's say a chess board and the pieces on it, does it look clear to you? Or do you have difficulties controlling your internal visualization?
(if anyone also with ADHD wants to answer, feel free)
When I try to phantasize something to calm myself down for sleep, I often end up thinking about something embarrassing or hurtful from the past. I can't control it, it just happens and when I notice it, I alread ruminates some time about it and don't know how I got there.
But besides that, I don't have problems to visualize things in my mind. I just have to do it consciously, most of the time I think in concepts.
I never considered my self suffering from it, my quirks were individual parts of my character!
But now I highly suspect I have it.
I lose focus all the time. For example, Going from doing laundry, to gathering dishes, and bringing out trash without finishing one of them. Or I can't read long articles with topics that are important for me but don't tickle one of my interests. I've started reading countless books for only 20-30 pages.
Also, it feels impossible to plan for/estimate longer time periods and I'm constantly bouncing my knee or stimm in another way.
I started freelancing because I couldn't get to work at the same time every day and even now I just work 5-10h a week, because my lack of motivation for repeating tasks.
I thought, well it's biological, I can't have it, my relatives are all normal... But wait, my mother did impulse purchases all the time, was switching jobs constantly and even retired with 50, because of that.
Whelp, guess I should get a psychiatrist soon...