I have been working in the IT industry for the last 13 years and I was diagnosed with ADHD around two years back.
As part of my job, I have to look at a lot of code. It used to be that I used to write a lot of it, but recently since getting promoted, my work now revolves mostly around reviewing the code others wrote or sometimes enhancing someone else’s code.
The problem comes when I come across some extremely convoluted legacy code. For example, like a function hierarchy with 10+ levels of function calls across several hundreds of lines. This causes me some problems understanding what’s going on because it’s nearly impossible for me to follow every branch to understand which part of the code needs fixing. After a while traversing the function calls I often forget how I got there and have to retrace my steps (I use debug breakpoints but it doesn’t help much). I also tend to get distracted with ideas of how to re-implement the whole thing with best practices rather than focus and work on delivering the fix that I am expected to do. This severely hampers my turnaround time and I’m sure my supervisors are frustrated.
What baffles me, however, is that my other colleagues look like they have no problems working on this codebase. So I cannot really blame the badly written code before my supervisors.
So I just wanted to ask anyone here who has ADHD, works in IT/Software Engineering how do you cope with a situation like this? Also, does medication help here?
I used to be on Atomoxetine, but after experiencing a nasty anxiety attack, I stopped about a month ago. Not that I observed any major improvements while I was on it.
PS: Apologies if the context does not make sense to any of you non-IT folks. I can clarify if you ask.
I agree that maintainability is important but the issue is that the team lacks that level of (professional) maturity. Actually they used to avoid writing design documents until I joined the organization and made everyone start doing it. They would simply see the user story and then get to work on the code. We’re talking about code written back in 2018 by some contractors, getting patched till today until it’s now spaghetti with meatballs and ragu on top.
I am planning a training session on DDD and clean architecture for the team so hopefully they will improve later.
Damn, you sound like me at my company… except I just got fired because I can’t fix code fast enough, and they reject any effort to improve it. 35 years of experience here. In some environments, pointing out problems leads to unemployment.
Someone needs to be the advocate for clean code and how it will reduce incidents and errors - it’s not easy but you can make progress. If you’re that deep in the whole automated tests might be a good focus?