Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by burntoutfire 1594 days ago
> It's quite interesting, but I believe that procrastination and burnout are rather obvious signs of ADHD and if you experience this you should verify this.

My guess is that procrastination and burnout are signs that work in our society is just not a good fit for our mental needs (see also immense popularity of video games, which provide "fake work" that is closer to what we need). I suspect there were no procrastination, burnout, ADHD and other mental afflictions among hunters-gatherers.
3 comments
gyulai 1594 days ago
Couldn't agree more. I don't see it as a reflection of my own mental state or mental health at all, just as a reflection of the fact that it's time to start looking for a new job.

I think that it is quite common for software engineers to have a feeling of being badly attuned to their work environments and then misattribute that as a problem that lies within themselves rather than their work environments.

I even feel that some management practices common to our field are basically a form of psychological abuse, akin to gaslighting, which provide to the employee a false reality where everything that goes wrong is their own fault. For example yearly reviews and institutionalized continuous feedback cultures tend to create a lot of salience around what an employee is doing wrong and should do differently in the eyes of management, while seldom allowing any iota of attention to fall on questions about what the company is doing wrong and should do differently in the eyes of the employee.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was something that ended up actually causing mental disorders in employees. This is pure speculation, but our field does have very poor stats on mental health [1]. A competing explanation is that our field is attractive to people with pre-existing problems and therefore draws in people with mental disorder, rather than creating mental disorder. Or maybe it's a combination of both.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-demog...

link
gyulai 1594 days ago
BTW: adhd_thraway Can you provide an e-mail or other way to reach out 1:1? There might be an opportunity for a collaboration here.
link
adhd_thraway 1593 days ago
Sure, it's anonymized though, cause I'd rather this thread to drown slightly so it's harder to link to (yeah, I can reply btw. from same address):

koncha_slizga_0b (at) icloud.com

link
Zababa 1594 days ago
> see also immense popularity of video games, which provide "fake work" that is closer to what we need

Or sports, or hobbies in general.

link
pseudalopex 1594 days ago
ADHD brains are physically different. You can see it with MRI. I suspect ADHD hunter gatherers hated weaving.
link
gyulai 1594 days ago
I wonder how robust those findings actually are, especially for high-functioning persons in the ADHD spectrum where the symptoms are not clinically debilitating.

I'm thinking now of how f-MRI is notoriously difficult to get right in methodological terms [1] while at the same time providing an all-to-convenient path for psychologists wanting to add credibility to their claims by tying them into physiological manifestation. I know next to nothing about the field though, so who knows. ...just expressing baseline scepticism I guess.

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-...

link
pseudalopex 1593 days ago
The problem with FMRI is fishing for correlations in an ocean of variables without adjusting the calculations. Structural MRI finding physical differences where older evidence predicted is very different.

Organisms are analog. Why would you expect marginally symptomatic brains to be clearly distinct?

link