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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
You mean the part where ADHD brains have lower baseline alertness which declines with cognitive effort far faster than a healthy person's, with impaired emotional and impulse control coming together to result in inability to maintain focus and motivation for anything that isn't urgent, exciting, or novel?
This study is absurdly poorly designed and its interpretation is as ridiculous as if you wrote "cancer was an evolutionary advantage because it made people more likely to worry about their health". Absurd.
It is possible for a trait that is broadly negative in most environments to confer enough of an advantage in a specific environment to be selected for: see sickle-cell anemia. And there are scenarios where people with ADHD outperform thise without (the famous "gorilla video" tends not to fool them, for example). But I agree this is basically only hinting at a possible hypothesis, nowhere near an actual conclusion.
This study bugs me. They got 450 qualified participants, of which over 80% were scored as having ADHD (wildly out of proportion with society at large). And the test was only 6 “How often” style questions.
And then it extrapolates advantages based on how shorter loiter times scored better on their game.
After preprocessing, 49 individuals were excluded from final analyses for the following criteria. First, they either failed pre-defined survey attention checks or did not complete every survey. Further, participants were excluded if they completed less than 25 trials (i.e. an exploit or explore decision) throughout the session, not counting incomplete patches (see below).
Why would that happen? Something to do with attention (deficit)?
I hit the paywall but I’m wondering how scientists can differentiate between something that was an evolutionary advantage, and something that was a mutation (is that the right word?) that wasn’t relevant to the evolutionary survival aspect and just lingered.
As the sibling comment put it so succinctly, "proliferation". To expand upon that, natural selection basically says that traits which are beneficial to survival or reproduction will become more widespread in a population over time, and traits which are detrimental to survival or reproduction will become more rare in a population over time. Ergo, the fact that ADHD is rather widespread indicates that it is, on the whole, beneficial to the survival and/or reproduction of the individual that carries it.
Of course, this is a drastic simplification. If you want to dive deeper, I suggest reading "The Selfish Gene".
But it in practice it seems everything has a cost. An extra useless toggle means more chance of cancer since you have more volume.
ADHD might be a negative from the species having smart people. Every now and again it breaks and you get ADHD. But having smart people makes up for that.
