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.
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.