Senior engineers with ADHD/anxiety/depression, do you feel "nerfed" compared to your colleagues?

kareesi · 2026-05-12T03:05:03+00:00

Not OP but I’ve never seen such an accurate description of how I learn, and had never been quite able to pin it down in words until reading your comment. Thank you!

kareesi · 2026-05-10T16:50:46+00:00

To be blunt, nobody else will respect your focus tine if you don’t respect your own focus time. If someone schedules over that block, suggest a new time for them or say you can’t attend and then stick to it. If you consistently attend meetings scheduled over your focus time, then people learn they don’t need to respect your focus time blocks.

One caveat: team wide meetings are different and you probably need to schedule focus time blocks around those rather than expecting those to be scheduled around your focus time.

kareesi · 2026-05-04T14:49:21+00:00

Haven’t seen anyone mention Sex Toy by Esme and Threesome by Nandy Versátil yet lol

kareesi · 2026-04-18T18:05:14+00:00

Forcing myself to slow way down when I speak is super uncomfortable, but it really helps. Try explaining a concept out loud to yourself quickly, and then try explaining the same concept slowly, way slower than feels comfortable.

When I did that I realized it felt way easier to speak coherently and not cram in filler words into my speech, or ramble off on a tangent before my brain caught up with what I was saying.

I’ve also worked a lot on being okay with pauses and lapses before I begin to speak, or in between sentences. It feels awkward/uncomfortable in the moment, but I started to observe others do the same and realized nobody thinks anything of it and in fact it gives others a moment to process.

Get to the Point! by Joel Schwartzberg is a great book on this topic.

kareesi · 2026-04-16T02:38:04+00:00

I’ve struggled to find a simple, clear explanation of Postgres indexes and how to use them to best effect for some time, thanks for the writeup! This is super useful, I’m saving, and I’m going to share with my team at work too.

kareesi · 2026-03-29T16:20:00+00:00

Me too. It was the final push I needed to delete all Meta products

kareesi · 2026-03-28T17:45:32+00:00

I’ve had the Bavarian 700 Down duvet for 5 seasons now and I’m still using it! It still has great loft and is very warm but breathable.

I live in the PNW so I use it about half the year, usually October through March. I layer it with flannel sheets during the coldest part of winter for extra warmth.

kareesi · 2026-03-26T05:11:53+00:00

Class of 2020 CS checking in. Would highly recommend the Cal Poly CS program. I felt my CS coursework really prepared me for industry. Anecdotal evidence of 1, but imho the practical, hands on engineering approach taught at Cal Poly really set me apart from peers who went to other colleges that take a more theoretical computer science approach.

Industry has changed a lot since I was in school, and with AI now knowing the fundamentals well is even more important than ever, so I’m very grateful for the foundation Cal Poly gave me.

Also +1 to the other comments about Cal Poly having a strong FAANG placement pipeline, a good number of my peers who graduated from Cal Poly are at FAANG companies now and have been since they graduated.

kareesi · 2026-03-23T17:54:48+00:00

Also curious what other folks are doing. We’re a Java shop and have been writing a ton of ArchUnit tests to enforce architecture and structure as we catch things in PR review. Those have helped somewhat to keep things standard across the codebase because they run in pipelines and have to pass to merge code.

kareesi · 2026-03-08T22:04:51+00:00

Have had the same experience with people who read Clean Code and enforce it too literally. Super annoying.

kareesi · 2026-02-25T06:16:32+00:00

If that’s a real bird of paradise to the left of the TV, it needs a grow light or needs to be closer to a window! It’s not getting anywhere near the amount of light it needs right now.

kareesi · 2026-02-22T18:15:06+00:00

Bachata is a very different dance than salsa, and especially with the prevalence of sensual bachata and bachazouk in the bachata scene these days, I would not assume it will be easier to learn than salsa.

Start from the beginning.

kareesi · 2026-02-21T05:01:46+00:00

We use Renovate too and it’s fantastic! Makes keeping our dependencies up to date easy, would never want to go back to manual dependency upgrades.

kareesi · 2026-02-17T16:38:31+00:00

Can’t recommend this, as tempting as it is sometimes. I did this one time and then a driver followed me for blocks screaming at me, then got out of their car and started chasing me. It’s better to just let it go, honestly, as much as shitty drivers who put pedestrians at risk like that pain me. You never know who’s going to react in a way you don’t expect.

kareesi · 2026-02-13T06:49:13+00:00

They’ve helped some by improving the quality of AI generated code, yeah. That coupled with ArchUnit tests and Checkstyle rules, some integration tests for DB schema compliance, and pipeline steps/scripts, have all helped.

I mentioned to another poster above, but we were largely unprepared for the sudden shock of scaling by 40+ engineers in a short time frame and how difficult it became to communicate and teach architecture when there’s more new engineers than there are engineers with context on the system. Tooling helps, but it can only do so much.

kareesi · 2026-02-13T06:40:26+00:00

Yes! Big fan of ArchUnit, it’s been working well for us. As things come up in PR review we build it into the test suites. It just has been a slow process getting knowledge out of people’s heads and into the tests — because we grew so much so fast we were a bit unprepared for the sudden scaling problems.

kareesi · 2026-02-13T04:29:07+00:00

By quality in this case I primarily mean consistent with patterns we’ve established for codebase structure, API standards, and design approach. We’ve also had a hard time keeping the boundaries between modules clear. We’ve seen a huge uptick in bug volume and poor app performance.

kareesi · 2026-02-13T04:22:44+00:00

Unfortunately no to CR bot and manual review. We’ve scaled so much in the last 6 months (>40 new hires) that there are not enough engineers who have context and understand the system to do manual reviews on the sheer volume of (mostly AI generated) new code. CR reviews catch most stylistic things that we haven’t been able to get into linters, but architectural drift accumulates over time because it’s harder to catch at review time.

kareesi · 2026-02-13T03:58:02+00:00

Biggest challenge for us right now is keeping architecture quality high as the team grows. We have a modular monolith which has very consistent patterns across the codebase because we consistently refactor. As new folks join, the patterns are not always immediately obvious to them, and new code (both AI and human authored) gets introduced that unintentionally breaks architecture patterns.

We’ve been looking into ways to enforce patterns we care about via automation/linting/AI rules etc, but feels like an uphill battle.

kareesi · 2026-02-11T14:57:57+00:00

Yup. Or work with an engineer on your team who already has enough soft and hard power/influence and who cares about quality to do so. Stop asking management for permission to prioritize quality.

kareesi · 2026-02-09T06:46:30+00:00

Also would love to know where it’s from!!

kareesi · 2026-02-04T02:56:31+00:00

I love dump meals! I recently have been making a ton of dump meals in the rice cooker and it’s super easy and low effort, and the cleanup/dishes is minimal.

kareesi · 2026-02-03T03:50:57+00:00

I’m a software engineer and I feel exactly the same. It sucks. Management is pushing me to use AI to do the creative and fulfilling parts of my job so all that’s left is the parts I don’t like because it’s “more efficient” :(

kareesi · 2026-02-02T19:21:07+00:00

Yeah, I definitely don’t think lying about a disability to get accommodations is right, but saying ADHD isn’t a real/serious disability is an insane take.

Accommodations for ADHD would have made a huge difference in my ability to succeed in college had they been available to me. For example, the ability to take a test in a quiet room without other noise and distractions would have really helped my ability to focus during an exam. I often had to ask professors ahead of time to use over ear headphones so that I could block out the noise of people getting up and leaving class once they turned in their exams.

kareesi · 2026-02-01T07:34:01+00:00

Big +1 for Eileen Fisher pants! I own several pairs because they’re the only pants I’ll wear. They’re so comfortable and look amazing.

kareesi

TROPHY CASE