[jeherr]

Fred sounds like he may have ADHD. I'm Fred and I have ADHD. Now I'm not an expert so it's not necessarily true. ADHD comes in a spectrum of severity, and plenty of ADHD symptoms are just things normal people have trouble with too.

That said people with ADHD tend to have trouble with delayed gratification. Helping your coworkers has immediate benefits when they are grateful for your help, even though long-term it may make things worse. We also tend to have a lot of social anxiety and care a lot what other people think about us (rejection sensitive dysphoria). For these reasons, I believe people with ADHD have learned to be very helpful to those immediately around us, even to a fault.

Fred still has to get his work done though. Have some empathy for him because you don't know what he may be dealing with compared to you, but it's not an excuse.

[toomanybeersies]

I also have ADHD and my experience is similar. It's generally much more enjoyable to bash out a bunch of small bugfixes and refactors then to slog away at a feature for a week.

I've managed to strike a deal with my manager that I get to spend 25% of my time working on reducing tech debt and other smaller fixes, and the rest on primary product development.

[AnthonBerg]

It's also that the cognitive systems variant usually called ADHD is highly flexible, broadly scoped, continously introspective, sensitive towards inefficiency, and can intuitively pattern-match across different contexts. This means that the "ADHD" mind is just better at seeing what needs to be improved in processes and tooling.