I’ve not heard anyone mention this aspect of paired programming for people with ADHD, although as a colleague once mentioned I jump from one thing to another, but in the end I’ve done the loop.
I get it. XP, and Agile in general, is all about relying less on individual programmers' focus on the task and more on external checks (a shoulder surfer and automated tests). The revolution of software development in the 21st century is building more effective teams rather than relying on super-productive individuals (the fabled 10x engineers). But I don't have to like working that way, and I don't.
Then, it slowly creeped up at work, and I noticed that initially, most people seemed uncomfortable with it. But, if we were able to build trust and get to a place where we weren't judging each other, just trying to make progress with the task, then things would magically flow and we could solve things that each person individually had been stuck on
We then mostly kept it to a weekly activity, in which we could tackle either specific tickets from a certain list that no-one was actively working on, or on specific things that someone would bring up and needed help with
I believe it's probably not the way to work every single moment, but it is definitely a very powerful and useful tool
Try background noise of any sort, until you find a fit.
I can't pay attention to anything anymore without noise. A little rumble in thy ears does wonders.
I severely question anecdotes that pair programming does anything other than motivate you to not look like a moron wasting time in front of someone else (in the context of ADHD -- there are other uses for it).
That isn't a viable strategy for growth, imo.
Also, if you are new to taking stimulants, you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth. There is a non-zero cost (I would say a sacrifice) to treating ADHD with amphetamines or other dopamine reuptake inhibitors / dopamingenics.
If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%20%22Body%20Doubling%...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Body%20Double%22%20...
So... you're basically saying it works? Because that's what it does in practice. The other person is the external motivator for keeping attention on the task.
> you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth
Got any support for that? (Not being dismissive; never heard of that beyond the usual "effectiveness goes down over time")
> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:
Yup, there's still little in terms of specific research, but if you look at the papers about externalising motivation/triggers... it's close to a specific implementation of those ideas rather than a separate thing.
> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs
Wow, I sure better stop doing everything in my life that there isn't literature on.
Meds. They never quite worked for me, others have noticed a change, but not me; and the side effects became too intrusive.
Working under pressure, I guess this is an issue for me. As mentioned it can be a load on the person you’re pairing with, but so often I can unlock skills pairing with someone that neither of us can ordinarily access.
What I find actually useful is a short, focused meeting with the relevant people before coding. That way, we align on what’s being built, resolve confusion, and then I can just go write the code.
Once I'm typing, I don’t see how having someone else there helps. It mostly just gets in the way — we keep having to stop and explain what we're thinking, which slows things down. And usually the other person gets confused at some point, so I have to stop and explain things again to get them back on track.
* You get unstuck faster.
* When the passenger does background research/slacking stakeholders meaning that the driver doesnt have to context switch. Sometimes they even just know the answer to something you would have to spend 30 minutes researching.
* When the passenger spots something you didnt (antipattern, bug, problem) and they spot it quickly before you dug yourself a hole with it.
* When it makes it easier to take bigger decisions and bigger risks as a pair - risks/decisions most people wouldnt feel confident about taking solo.
* When those decisions are better - fewer rabbit holes are jumped into, more landmines are averted.
* When your respective coding philosophies developed over decades hit one another and you try to synthesize something that accomodates the best of both (this is next level pairing).
Mostly I find the productivity gains come from the quality of decisions being higher, which is invisible short term but overwhelming long term.
It doesnt help much if the person is very junior and needs to have everything explained but if theyre junior pairing is the best way to train and mold them into something better, which is probably what you want, right?
Also, I'm reading lots of comments that are pointing out that they don't like doing pair programming because they do it wrongly.
In the past I wrote an article about it: https://domenicoluciani.com/2022/07/22/misleading-pair-progr..., I hope it helps to clarify some concepts behind this way of working
I've also found it helps sometimes to have the TV on in the other room, on some mindless sports pundit show that I can half-listen to.
When I have some task I don't want to do, especially if it's something no one is expecting me to do right away but I still need to get it done, I go to Starbucks and don't leave until it's finished.
For the most comprehensive and effective solution, medication is still the go-to. Disregard any stigma and misguided fears around it and just get medicated.
...A popup slides into view in the lower right-hand corner.
That's when I closed the tab. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used this during the early pandemic and found it very useful
Okay. Maybe I can apply this metaphorical technique
> You’re gonna need a literal body
I’m out.
Pair programming might help when training juniors, since they need that level of hand-holding. But for experienced devs, constant back-and-forth while typing mostly just adds friction.
Instead of getting notification that you made a mistake within a few seconds of making it you are told at, say, 4pm, 45 minutes after you raised the PR, 4 hours after you made the mistake and in time for you to maybe fix it tomorrow. Also, if it was a rabbit hole mistake thats a whole lot of wasted work.
With PRs I find reviewers tend to miss more stuff (especially forest-not-trees stuff) because there are usually a lot of changes all going on at the same time and because the mental tax of trying to grasp all of the necessary context is higher.
The pre-coding discussions also do NOT provide the same value because many problems only become apparent after you've started coding. Only correctly anticipated problems are caught at that stage.
Code reviews and pre coding discussions are still good practices and add value of their own (especially because for some issues you do benefit from > 2 sets of eyes), but not as substitutes for pairing.
Pairing is also effective at training juniors and onboarding, but not only.
Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns.
> Got any support for that?
Anecdotally, ~25 years of eating them, but there is plenty of evidence that prolonged use of amphetamine causes structural neuronal changes, even at therapeutic doses.
Here is one article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38665308/
> you look at the papers about externalising motivation/triggers
What papers? What do they say?
Also, fear (an external motivator) is a great way to release catecholamines for positive outcomes in ADHD, but it is also a great way to increase general stress, which has many other outcomes (free cortisol changes, etc).
Except that pair programming doesn’t make you work under pressure. I extensively use this technique for body doubling as much as I can. It motivates me to start the task and I also love the exchange : you can learn things, teach things, be stuck together, find solutions together, swear together, laugh, agree on how horrible is this thing you must fix …
In fact it’s what I’d call real teamwork. I never felt it like pressure and it gives me a lot of energy.
Incidentally, I think the only friends I made at work (the real friends you invite at home even when you don’t work at the same place anymore) were through frequent pair programming sessions. I think there is something about knowing how the other person thinks that helps bonding together.
Sure, in ideal circumstances.
Do you remember your first day on a job anywhere as a programmer? You were so relaxed, no pressure.
It sounds like you have an emotional attachment to pair programming. That is cool, but it certainly isn't the norm.
None of ADHD related stuff is really therapy. We only know how to manage symptoms for now.
> Anecdotally
Yeah...
> prolonged use of amphetamine causes structural neuronal changes
Sure. But is it worse than unmanaged ADHD which also results in brain changes over time?
> What papers? What do they say?
It's a whole category, but you could start with this collection:
https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/00e762a8efd5581c93afcb8...
Every time ADHD coaching is mentioned, part of that process is learning planning ahead for distractions, part is learning to externalise reminders / triggers and hacking the reward functions. Maybe there's some paper which tests each of those in isolation, but I'm not going to dig that deep. In aggregate, ADHD coaching has positive results. Pairing is an extreme version of one part of it.
> Also, fear (an external motivator)
Pairing with others shouldn't involve fear. It's just two people being able to share and communicate the motivation to initiate the next step / question. If it causes you actual stress, either you're doing it with a wrong person, or it may just not be for you.
Managing symptoms is therapy?
>> Anecdotally
> Yeah...
Then ignore everything that came after that?
> Sure. But is it worse than unmanaged ADHD which also results in brain changes over time?
Physiologically, yes? I am honestly concerned for people who think eating amphetamine or similar drugs daily has no negative outcomes.
> It's a whole category, but you could start with this collection:
There is zero mention of anything discussed here in that root paper, but cool information bomb. No one is going to read 40 papers to respond to you. Honestly, that is a dickhead thing to share.
> shouldn't involve fear
If you've never felt nervous (fear) while pair programming, you might be experiencing a bit of over-confidence.
They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.
It’s the worst of both worlds.
Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.
In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time.
That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation.
It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.
Cause that's just... the worst.
Ive worked in:
1) collaborative in office
2) uncollaborative in office
3) collaborative wfh
4) uncollaborative wfh
Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better.
1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall.
After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO.
I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.
Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.
The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.
When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...
Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.
I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.
I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck.
Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.
The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.
Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.
Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it.
Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in.
I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?
On my own I can work about 2 hours on and 10 mins off, sometimes for 10+ hours total. If I have a 2 hour collab coding call, that’s about all I’ll do that’s productive that day. I’l literally have to spend the rest of that day mentally recovering from the stress of the call.
I used to do a lot more socially and my computer was in the living room with the roomie, but I'm just in my room most of the time, and this is making me think - maybe I should go back to the living room with my computer (since she's out there too most days), maybe that will help me be more productive in programming/projects, etc...
The moment a guest enters my apartment, my body immediately begins cleaning my kitchen and putting away dishes and cleaning up messes or tidying my living room.
I never thought of this in the body doubling context, but as a self-soothing thing for social pressure. Or maybe genuine guilt for the state of my apartment. It gives me something to do instead of just standing around maintaining eye contact (and the second effect of making the place nicer to exist in, for me and my guest).
Kind of reminds me of another social self-soothing thing, where if I'm not entirely comfortable with a guest (a newer friends or romantic partner) I subconsciously place something in between us, like standing on opposite sides of the kitchen island.
>Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
I feel this in my bones. I've been living alone for a few years and I'm actually going to move in with a roommate soon to see if it can keep me "online" more often without draining me. I totally think it's a good idea to try hang or work in the living room with your laptop.
On days that I’m with workmates, I get nothing done. On days I’m by myself, sitting by strangers, I’m really productive. I can just lock in and chug through my work. It never made sense to me until I learned about body-doubling, kind of feels like what I was inadvertently doing on those solo days.
Last week I finally rented a small private office. The difficulty finding coworking spaces that offered external monitors, 24/7 access, and direct sunlight in a part of NYC that was convenient led me to just get the private office.
Renting was a no brainer after I tried it for a day. The little room outside home for me just to work felt shockingly great. But now I wonder if in time I’ll regret not going with a dedicated shared desk where I’m around others.
Too bad this is incompatible with the society. So we got to pay the context switching tax.
Does the writer believe that, or are they pandering?
Many people with ADHD also suffer from complex PTSD (see comorbidity studies), and unless treated, this has effects like social anxiety and emotional dysregulation.
Emotional neglect in early childhood for example can be a ‘silent‘, non-obvious factor at play here (even caring parents can be emotionally unavailable for longer periods of time due to environmental or personal reasons!), which for the later adult means they have not (yet) learned the skill to regulate their nervous system on their own and can make use of a replacement ‘caretaker‘.
As such, it's extremely irritating.
Archive version[0] does not have such problem.
As libraries reinvent themselves for an era where all the world’s knowledge is available on my cell phone, I wish more emphasis was placed on meeting booths.
Because then I’d work from them all day and never consider coworking spaces.
I have this same brain. Working in public at a coffee shop is a great baseline, but it's even better if I can feel the social pressure to not fuck off even if it's made up by my own neurotic head. It's a crazy double-edged sword to wield. Really useful, but I think it heightens burnout and I can't stand to stay in the same place for long due to the palpable buildup of pressure to Go Home.
And on the flip side, it seems there is no remote way of getting the same feeling. Even having my business partner on Discord doesn’t really do it. He doesn’t feel like he is parallel working as much as TOO close in that case.
Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN
Good episode. Recommend. Be aware that most folks who think they have ADHD really don't. Just like "OCD" and "migraines", people just like to throw labels on themselves.
> Originally published in 1996, this article was republished on February 20th, 2025.
But my idea was a bit more. A lot of people are leaving religions for many reasons. One of the interesting parts of religion, from my perspective, is a community of people meeting at some cadence (e.g. once per week). At that time, they all make a public commitment to some set of values. It's like a shared affirmation.
This led me to wonder if this ritualistic activity is important in a psychological way that is effective outside of theistic or other dogmatic beliefs.
I was thinking of a service exactly like the ones mentioned, except it would also include some kind of intention setting. The word "prayer" is a little loaded and often brings to mind asking a God for some kind of favor. And "intention" is more like a stated goal.
It is interesting that in the modern world we feel comfortable stating/sharing intentions that are productivity related. But we don't share intentions that are more broadly ethical/moral in the same way that religions promoted.
If anyone has examples of services that do what Focusmate/Flow Club/etc. are doing but on a broader scale, let me know.
I suggested the idea of a responsiblabuddy website today to my wife – if we're both in the same town I'd commit to coming to your house on Saturday and you'd commit to coming to mine on Sunday and I'd finally tidy my shed / weld those batteries / list those items on fb marketplace etc. Then I realised I'd need a responsabilabuddy to get me to start and finish the website!
There was a guy running a co-working space in Dublin (Ireland) who would open it up on the occasional Sunday for "Sideproject Sundays" which I found great for focus.
Edit: there are no search results for "responsiblabuddy", I know I didn't come up with that term
As a child, I noticed that my brain worked differently when someone was in my room. I begged my mom to stay in my room so I could clean my room, but she didn't understand what the point was.
To me it was less his mere presence and more the ability to immediately share any thoughts that would occur to me. Also air conditioning.
Same goes with chores - I would much rather have someone be in the same room while I e.g. do the dishes or cook.
I also noticed that if I don't have anyone close, I start talking to myself.
That sounds like a strong argument for working from the office and it is, but to me it doesn't outweigh the disadvantages. For one I could pull this off only because my commute was short thanks to it being vacation season, so traffic was way smaller than normal.
The other critical factor was sharing a space with somebody who wanted to work in a similar way. If you shared that space with somebody who was significantly more or less social, the impedance mismatch could have been very negative.
Personally, I would like to vicariously YouTube double with a “friend” on our private jet. For about four hours, then another hour looking out the window, listening to said friend continuing to work, while I enjoy a well earned inflight (I.e. home made) cocktail before we land on a tropical island.
Someone would like to host videos like that for a living.
But whenever I visit he makes huge breakthroughs and I notice that he really wants me to come visit, and he asks me more and more questions on IM and shares his thoughts and progress.
He has a hard time coming out and saying what he feels but I'm observing that he works better with me present.
What's funny though is that I'm the absolute opposite. When someone is present and only slightly focused on what I'm doing, I act as if I have ADD.
I wonder if a plushie can act as substitute.
Keep it on the corner of the desk when on task. Maybe have different plushies for different tasks.
Once you've got a few regular partners Focusmate blossoms.
It’s not perfect for keeping me on task, but does at least keep me at my desk.
This is a completely free discord server that has pomodoro channels, screen share, cam share etc and also tracks your progress. Hope it helps people like it has helped me.
I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked.
Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in it so I quit.
Modafinil really worked, despite leaving my body feeling drained and sore. I didn't want to keep taking it though.
The word “beyond” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence (I say as someone with the same diagnosis)
You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.
For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.
I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
sox --no-show-progress -c 2 --null synth 3600 brownnoise band -n 1500 499 tremolo 0.05 43 reverb 19 bass -11 treble -1 vol 14dB fade q .01 repeat 9999
CNoise noise => LPF lpf => dac;
noise.mode("flip");
lpf.freq(120);
while(true) {
1::second => now;
}To help me with my ADHD (diagnosed at 42) I put on some Jungle[A], listen to the repetitive Mountain[B] or even a modern classic like Phillip Glass or Terry Riley[C]. I know it sounds mad, but it gets some body part whipping and just overwhelms any distracting thought I could possibly have.
[A] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7boqBRRiQw [B] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGyVgm6uiSk [C] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRaa34E8tXQ
If my current mitigations don’t help, i’ll be forced to file for a wfh exception, but those tend to be denied where i work (fang). I’m already on medications to manage my stressors (of which there are many), so i feel like i’m almost out of options in an RTO world…
This issue is compounded by presenting as neurotypical, as i’m forced to mask when sharing physical space with neurotypicals. this is exhausting on its own, and i’ve found to be largely unavoidable in a large setting via trial and error spanning 20+ years in industry.
AuDHD is almost a full contradictions of needs. I excel with body doubles, but they can’t regularly interact with me without me loosing the current “thread”. I crave novelty, but require structure. It’s a difficult thing to understand, let alone live with…
Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background sound I had on didn't match the task, so I'd look for something else... Overall a bit annoying for some groups of tasks.
I'm experimenting with mixing music with podcasts with extra noise and turning it on and off, but I also made https://stimulantnoi.se/ (with extra reading on psychological basis of the design and link to open source standalone desktop app on https://incentiveassemblage.substack.com/p/why-is-nobody-ser...). It allows for mixing (including uploading additional) sounds into sets and binds switching between those whole sets to media keys for quick access.
I also like the white/brown/pink noise a lot. I think sometimes I crave a bit more texture and feature in the noise and so I’ll pull up endel, but I get by really well without it a lot of the time too.
Open offices save employers more money (they hope) in space than they lose in lowered productivity. There's no reason to think your average Joe or Jane can just carry on working in one as efficiently as in a private office.
Perhaps a predictable sound that drowns all others allows my brain to “shut down” the little part of it that is on edge waiting for noises and distractions.
Seems like something that could lead to permanent hearing damage
Simplest version is to have agreed upon avenues of escalation, which can be ”if someone doesn’t respond in the timeframe you need, pick up the phone and call them, and if they still don’t respond, pick up the phone and call their boss”.
Then from your end, you just need to make sure your boss is set as a favorite contact or whatever is required for them to be allowed through your do-not-disturb settings.
You can also set other routines like weekly check in meetings with certain groups. Often times people don’t need you right now, but they think blowing you up on slack is the only way to get what they need. By setting aside a couple hours one morning and having several “office hours” style meetings, you give people the comfort of knowing they have a time they can get your attention, and that often cuts down on 50-80% of the ad-hoc interruptions.
Async doesn't mean "rarely", it means you must set the pace. Notifications contradict this paradigm, so they are completely off.
I switch to these tabs/apps manually, at my own pace, which is sometimes relaxed, but at times can be super-dense.
I find that the fact that I rarely get stuck for long and the mistakes I make tend to get caught more quickly makes pairing vastly more productive in practice.
The productivity isnt directly in the speed of code output but the compounded effect over time of it being higher quality - meaning vastly less time doing post hoc debugging, bugfixing, reworking code, etc. It is invisible over the space of one or two tickets, visible over weeks and overwhelming over months.
At one company my pairing team routinely (and quietly) worked 9-3:30pm or 4pm while the surrounding nonpairing teams worked overtime and still delivered way less. If you can nail it it really is almost unreasonably effective.
Funny enough, the two guys who pushed for it never did any pairing.
The CEO put the kibosh on it when he noticed the staff was not only unproductive but also massively unhappy.
It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
I found myself having to allocate mental bandwidth to my environment to allow for the possibility of being interrupted by others, so I ended up both less productive and more tired.
I struggled a lot with impulse control but that’s managed well with meds. I often “zone out” when doing.. well pretty much anything that I’m not very interested in
It's much more fucking concise than the drivel of the republished stuff.
But when I do with someone faster and that actually likes to discuss the implications, philosophy behind what we're doing it's amazing
Ideally, I'd like to allow sharing and storing of presets, but it was simply out of scope for the PoC - the functionality is there in the desktop version btw, but it on the other hand asks users to download an unknown .exe and then share mp3 and json files with each other, putting us firmly in the mid-90s'.
It's especially surprising if the 'audio playing' icon is there, since that should be coming from the browser itself.
My thinking isn’t logical and it doesn’t use language internally. It’s difficult to explain but, due to mental disability I’m using my visual memory to do all of my information processing.
Let’s say it is not easy to describe a picture in words if things get complex.
I suspected that it was from the APs, so I looked for research and found a few papers that showed links between APs and gray matter loss. So, I stopped taking the APs (the side-effects were really bad, anyway), but my mind hasn't really recovered though.
It's extremely frustrating. I have to constantly write 'to do' lists. And, I have to put my thinking down on paper. I used to be able to hold big models in my mind and just code. It's slowed down my productivity probably 70%.
edit: i probably should have lead with what that abbreviation meant, but although counterintuitive they’re common comorbidities
Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?
I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here.
It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful.
At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.
I wish I could find that again.
Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
This is actually something I'm cautiously optimistic about with the advent of AI tooling. Maybe we can make a 5-10 person company work for a much wider range of businesses now? I think it needs to be planned from the start, as all the pressure from investors and just the status quo is to grow headcount at least to an order of magnitude or so larger than that.
But I do think I'd love to work in a very small business (or partnership, or co-op) that is explicitly not trying to grow bigger than a team all working directly together.
So on any given day, you could pick the appropriate environment to work in, while still being within casual reach of everybody else for those impromptu conversations. and of course people could have lunch together in the café.
I thought the temporary workgroup offices were a great idea. A few people working on a new feature could move in there for a couple of weeks to get focused time together, and have daylong conversations without bugging everybody else.
In principle I don’t see why less clever people like myself can’t get together and solve less challenging problems in the same way.
Imagine if the Linux kernel took this approach.
It's not that hard.
But only if you are working in close proximity to those working on the same projects and leadership going up at least two levels. (leadership, not management)
Why large companies with globally distributed teams see value in having employees in office sitting side by side in isolation is beyond me.
Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.
For who? Your employer keeps all the value and only employees pay the cost. Why would I want this as an employee?
You don’t see your coworkers in the hall, overhear them talking to their kid, or talk while working. Certainly don’t by default interact with folks who work in parallel.
Not saying that in office means these things will certainly occur. But because by default these interactions don’t occur, the likelihood of them happening organically is quite low.
But the bar is even higher for 3 than 1 and likelihood of it occurring organically lower.
An example I would suggest is the push for "always more" no matter how much has been given.
Employer: "Great job succeeding in delivering our release death march on time! You are all the best!"
Us: "Comp time to rest?"
Employer: .oO(awkward choice employee...) "You agreed to a full time position, it will be fine for you to work your normal 40 and do make work."
That I've experienced almost that directly. Not in every role but it did happen. That particular company lied to me about the role too so I ended up leaving.
The thing that concerns me is that we start with these overly strong statements. The next stage is some of us become convinced of them. After that some of those transition to believing companies are obliged to them and start behaving accordingly. But these beliefs are bad for business and everyone involved. They create iterative counter solving games that reduce satisfaction and productivity. While I've always done my best by my employers, the concrete delivery of that effort has varied based on external factors but mostly the health of the work environment. No one has gotten as much of of me as startups that set a clear goal and let me work.
It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.
Do you work in HR?
Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.
This has got to be an ADA violation for someone with ADHD.
Not that it matters anymore.
I think the biggest blind spot is management's negative emotional externalities which cost far more than anything else. Many of us got into this because we love it, let's us sincerely do our job well, please!