One the other hand, people who feel like their engines are firing on all cylinders all the time (ie ADHD and friends) might find some relief in a drug that allows them to slow down and switch of their head radio while firing on only one cylinder...
The problem with ADHD and friends cause is that my brain actually _doesn't_ fire on all cylinders. While I think I feel the same way as everyone else and I have the same cognitive ability, I don't have the energy to structure my work, complete it and keep track of things in ways other classmates/coworkers magically can.
Cannabis certainly has a calming effect that could lower the hyperactivity component, but it doesn't address the attention deficit part.
The reason the most common treatment are stimulants like Ritalin, is because it "wakes us up" and brings us ADHD people to an alertness level similar to what our peers have by default.
I definitely benefit from this. I find pot to be a great context switcher. Formerly after working on a problem for long hours, when I would go home I would still be immersed in the problem and unable to take my mind off it. Now when I come and have my things in order I warm up a vape bag and put on some jazz and am able to completely detach from work and really just enjoy my nights.
I use a completely different method (to detach from whatever it is - work or something else). I pick an instrument and play some music. Something anyone can do, as long as you don't fret about being good or not.
I always end up coming home from work, eating dinner, showering, queuing up a movie, smoking weed, having some random insight on a work related problem, and never getting around to the relaxing activity I had planned!
Haha, you are on some hyperbole stuff my dude. If you want to work super hard your whole life go for it. I am very satisfied working my 8 hours and then putting that work aside and enjoying my leisure time.
I still of course work extra some times or do productive things in my time off, but yeah unless there's a deadline I'm not gonna worry about some work problem on off hours when I can't even make progress until I get back to my work computer anyways.
Fear/worry/anxiety is the mind killer and often helps nothing.
And I never understood slaving away for your employee while you're not getting paid for it.
Relaxing is not overrated at all, it improves your ability to focus, and even makes you more productive. Far from depriving you of any powers or skills.
To each their own, but I'm not paid to work 24 hours per day, and doing so would undoubtedly affect my outside-of-work relationships and interests.
My experience is that there is not a linear relationship between effort invested and output. It's a diminishing returns problem after 8-10 hours per day, so it's not even productive for me to spend all day and night churning on a work problem, even if I wanted to do that.
I don't make my bed in the morning. But when my bed happens to be made, it is so refreshing to just come at night and sleep soundly. Like a reset button was hit.
ADHD was pretty much the reason I struggled in school. The diagnosis gave me access to medication which turned a knob between two settings:
Be social, happy, energetic, hungry, incapable of succeeding in the education system of the 90s, 00s. (default me)
Be quiet, jittery, never eat, anti-social, depressed at times, but kick ass at school.
Tried a lot of different ADHD medications and generally found success in simply selectively switching that knob when I wanted to be a human or when I wanted to be a learning machine.
I wonder what pot would have done... never really thought about it.
Not a doctor but someone who was in a similar boat but to me it sounds like that dosage might have been too high, or you weren't taking it regularly enough. I found that once I was able to negotiate with my doctor to a lower prescription I was able to mostly get rid of the negatives of ADHD medicines. I found in general via a lot of other friends who were prescribed in the 90s/00s that their dosages were crazy high to start with as well.
Nope. ADHD is a spectrum. Often times it was/is misunderstood and its victims would feel isolated from the world. Marijuana would make that worse on certain vectors. It is not a silver bullet. It is a role of the dice. And the condition of the moment that you take it in decides the fate of the drug's effects on you. Could be good or bad.
I have diagnosed ADD/ADHD. Would hardly consider myself a "victim." It has pros and cons just like everything else in life. Personally I don't take medication and am totally sober. Mindfulness meditation helps tremendously
I meant in the context of a misunderstood person who nobody knows has ADHD and possesses behaviors that do not fit the norm, he is a victim of unjust social attitudes.
1. Hyperfocus. It has been tremendous for programming or even reading. There's sort of an ADD threshold that I break through after ~30 minutes of self discipline and pain. Then I'm suddenly in the zone, some kind unshakeable state, for hours on end. Most people I know seem to need a break after 30-60 minutes, right when I'm just getting into it.
2. Fun and physical activity. I use extreme difficulty of maintaining attention as an indicator that what I'm doing is just not stimulating or interesting enough. Of course this might not be good when you're with other humans, but I find I'm often able to focus on things better when my body is moving. That means when I take someone out on a date somewhere, it's usually very interesting and unusual.
3. Fast context switching. This may be more of a coping mechanism than a benefit, but often times rather than focusing on a single task, I'll "procrastinate" by switching between multiple important tasks repeatedly or working on things that are peripherally related. As a result, I have a breadth of knowledge that helps me think creatively and still get work done as needed.
4. Creative thinking. I believe (anecdotally, no evidence) that people with ADD are less likely to get stuck in a rut, or get bogged down with repetitive, boring, familiar things, because we simply don't have the attention span for it.
I havent noticed any difference in how fast I recognize changes between me and coworkers. If at all, I seem to miss changes more often, as my mind usually goes "was that allways like that? I guess so", since recall of memories can be pretty flaky
The anti-drug-guy I am in this discussion: you are so right. It should be much more acceptable to just fire on one cylinder sometimes, just for the sake of human dignity.
I'm a very anxious person and my mind is always going a million miles an hour. I have find the occasional light usage of marijuana does wonders for me.
This topic is more complex than simple HN comments are going to cover. There are different types of ADHD and though ADHD is good for software development (because of hyperfocus) it's also correlated with having a lower IQ. So high functioning ADHD people are a rarity and they're often in software or something similar for a multitude of reasons.
What you read here is how smart people with ADHD feel about their condition. It's dangerous to extrapolate to the broader public. You're also going to miss much of the conversation because most people that have tried pot once or twice aren't going to comment on it because they know how it's going to end up in a database somewhere. So you're going to see more pro-pot arguments than "I tried it and it didn't work for me" arguments.
Also ADHD-PI, and yeah, hyperfocus is great for coding, but you have to be working on something "interesting enough" to trigger it. Not all the work you will do at work will be interesting, so without treatment you swing wildly between being super productive and massively unproductive, which might be okay in a small startup but fails to mesh with larger companies that expect any sort of consistency in your output.
So it's not just the loss of productivity from inattention that's a problem for most jobs, but the lack of consistency in your output.
I'm just going to combine these responses because they're related.
> Neurotypicals can hyperfocus as well, and personally for me (ADHD-PI) I hyperfocus very few times at work, but more frequently at home.
Yes, neurotypicals can hyperfocus as well, but I've found that ADHD coders are way more likely to hyperfocus. The key is setting up the environment around them. I'm also ADHD-PI if it matters, though my specific situation is more complicated so it went undiagnosed for decades.
> So it's not just the loss of productivity from inattention that's a problem for most jobs, but the lack of consistency in your output.
Agree here too; especially for the unmedicated.
That said, very few neurotypicals hit the performance I see from high functioning ADHD coders (~2000-3000 commits a year and completely ridiculous learning rate with new technology).
Neurotypicals are also less pissed off with minor annoyances than ADHDers and ASDers, so they don't code up solutions to little problems that cost them 5 seconds a day, when in the long run that it is worth it to do so.[0]
But you're right that the bigger the team, the worse they do. Especially if the project is a tarball of uninterestingness and wrought with pointless, unscheduled meetings and other interruptions.
ADHD is, to my knowledge, caused by a too low reward mechanism in the brain. Ie, the brain constantly attempts to find something to get a dopamine release, constantly flicking to a new channel on the TV, so to speak, because it's incapable of finding a particular program interesting.
The stimulants generally used allow the brain to get a reward for the current activity, pushing it over the threshold and allowing it to focus on an activity and pay attention to a situation.
On the inverse, simply making the brain slower would yield similar results, IMO. It likely wouldn't fix it overall, you would still suffer from an attention deficit but the overall condition would slow down a bit. That might help a lot.
