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.
Skim the book, “working effectively with legacy code”. In a nutshell, you write characterization tests around the module or method, then do safe IDE based refactorings, then do some slightly more significant refactorings. After that the code should make enough sense for you to make changes if you need to.
It is as much in art as a science. The important thing is that as you are doing refactorings, the main one you do is to extract methods, and give the methods clear names that say what they are doing. You should be left with a top-level method that reads like a narrative of what the whole thing does.
Medication helps me quite a bit. I am also using Atomoxetine. The effect is much more subtle than stimulants, but I think just as powerful in the long run.