ADHD and Software Engineering: A Match Made in Heaven?
According to the Institute of Engineering and Technology survey, nineteen percent of their volunteer community identified as definitely or possibly neurodivergent. In a Stack Overflow blog from 2023, they point out that there’s even enough of an overlap between people with ADHD and coders that there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to ADHD programmers with over 65,000 members.
So ADHD is a common presence in software engineering, but what could be causing this love affair between ADHD and programming? Let’s dig in.
I know this is html code and not technically programming but most stock images tend to be!
When it comes to programming in the real world, there is one resource out there that beats all others. You use it when you’re learning, you use it on the job and without it programming efficiency would drop to a snail's pace. That resource is Stack Overflow.
It’s been a lifeline throughout my programming career but what I didn’t know until I began researching for this post is that Stack Overflow have done a little looking into this topic themselves, in fact two blog posts were published in 2023 looking into the experiences of ADHD for programmers.
As part of their blog posts, they took a high level look into both the benefits and challenges for ADHD programmers, but we’re going to go into this in even more detail with another source later on. Because what I found particularly interesting about these two blog posts wasn’t the benefits and challenges, but actually the discussions of reasons why.
Part 1: Why do ADHDers love programming?
There were a few reasons given for why ADHDers seemed to enjoy programming. One was that there is a steady stream of problems to be solved, with each successful problem solved giving a burst of tasty dopamine for our dopamine starved brains. Another reason given was that coding can both encourage and reward hyperfocus and I definitely know that feeling of slipping into the uninterrupted flow state of hyper productivity. Except in my case it never lasted very long because I was in a loud open plan office where there were constant interruptions. But more on that later.
The last suggestion they gave is how much opportunity there was to ideate and use their creativeness for problem solving. All three of these things have a mutually beneficial relationship between ADHD and programming.
However, it might also be the case that programming jobs suit ADHDers not just because coding itself is something that works well for the ADHD brain, but actually it could be moreso due to the nature of the companies themselves.
I mean this is a blog post on ADHD software engineers, what else did you expect me to use for imagery?
Why tech companies can be a little more ADHD-friendly
Tech companies tend to be more relaxed than the rest of the corporate world in many ways. One of which is that schedules tend to be a bit more flexible. There tends to be less micromanaging and tech workers are often given problems to solve and left to go ahead and solve them in their own time, however works best for them.
Tech companies also tend to be much more open to remote working, or at least hybrid styles of working, and for an ADHD insomniac who sometimes can’t sleep, being able to ditch the commute and flex the schedule is a huge win.
Finally, not something that affects me much in the UK but is a huge point for our friends in the US; big tech companies tend to have good health insurance and for someone with ADHD that can make life a whole lot easier, the most obvious of which is the access to meds for ADHD management.
Now these advantages aren’t universal across tech companies and programming roles and the interest in programming isn’t universal across ADHDers, however it does appear that a certain kind of tech company compared with a certain flavour of ADHD have the potential to get along pretty well.
How well do tech and ADHD get along?
So how well do they get along? Well I actually got the inspiration to write this video based on a study I stumbled across that came out in June 2024 called “Challenges, Strengths and Strategies of Software Engineers with ADHD: A Case Study” which set out to explore exactly this.
What’s interesting in this paper as well is how they define software engineers for the paper because they haven’t actually just included those in a technical role as individual contributors, but also extended this to include people who were managerial with previous technical experience.
I actually love this because I feel like the state of play right now is that the world is starting to recognise that ADHD people exist and it can actually be quite a good thing to get them into your teams, but there’s still a bit of a glass ceiling when it comes to management with very little out there about ADHD in leadership, a place I’m passionate about and where I specialise in with my neurodivergent leadership coaching. So it’s really nice to have a study that actually acknowledges these people exist and wants to hear from them directly!
But I digress, if you want to hear me passionately advocate for why we need more neurodivergent leaders, I’ve already made a post about it.
Back to the study du jour. They included 19 participants in direct interviews to paint a picture of the lived experiences of those with ADHD. The participants were made up of thirteen men, three women, of which one was trans, and three who didn’t disclose a gender spread across South America, Eurpoe, North America and Asia. They also separately interviewed four experienced managers all with 14+ years of software engineering experience.
So with these interviews undertaken. What did they actually find?
We’re going very literal with the imagery today. Here is a glass ceiling to show the glass ceiling for ADHDers in leadership.
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Part 2: Why programming loves ADHDers
The paper splits the programming specific strengths into five categories and we’re going to take them one by one.
The first thing the paper mentions is creativity and divergent thinking. More than half the interviewees said they had the ability to be creative and think outside the box. They mentioned their creativity was linked to their various interests and they’ve actually downplayed the ability in the workplace.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ADHD hyperfixations lead to us learning all sorts of interesting information about a wide range of topics and innovation occurs at the intersection of all of these topics. The more breadth of knowledge we have, the more capability we have to be creative and that’s why generalists rock. I’ve done a whole post about why ADHD generalists are incredibly valuable in the workplace already.
What’s interesting is that two of the interviewees were highlighted in this section for being able to understand that what they produce is new and novel but struggling with perceiving it as creativity. Have a read of these quotes:
“I’m creative but I don’t feel like it’s… when most people say creative it’s what they think of.”
“I’ve just like glued a few things together and built this thing that does a lot of stuff that no one else has done.”
I find this is often the case with ADHDers. We really don’t see just how amazing we are and find it really hard to celebrate ourselves, something that I spend a lot of time working on with my clients. I tend to find that we struggle with impostor syndrome a lot, and this is a recurring theme among the clients I speak to.
A sense of reward
The next round of strengths was linked to tasks that provide the feeling of having a reward and a big part of that was problem solving. Many of the interviewees also stated that they were good at solving puzzles and thinking through multiple different steps, citing investigating incidents or fixing bugs as places where these skills arose.
This was also linked with the previous creativity because exploring new and novel things was found to be a reward in itself and by picking up and learning new skills and spreading that knowledge around the team they were pushing forward the technical capabilities of the team.
Finally they highlighted strong performance on tasks that provided immediate feedback or iterative improvements where many enjoyed and did well at debugging or working on the product side of the project.
We always work better when we have a sense of reward
A different perspective
The third set of strengths were related to the perspective ADHDers brought, once again highlighting that broad interest and how this enables them to think about wider aspects of a particular system or project and make connections others were less likely to see.
They also were better at thinking ahead when it came to anticipating potential future problems or how projects will play out in the future. What’s really interesting is that the paper contrasts this with general discussion around ADHD that suggests that we only live in the “now”, that joke about ADHD having two modes, the “now” and the “not now”.
The paper doesn’t go further than noting this contrast but this could potentially be an interesting area for further ADHD research. I know I’m personally someone whose top strength is that they’re futuristic so it’s nice to see I’m not the only exception.
The next strength section is always the one I caveat but again hyperfocus comes up. We know the drill on this one, hyperfocus is amazing and when we get into hyperfocus we get SO much done but it always comes with the disclaimer that we can’t choose what we hyperfocus on or when it happens.
The rarely discussed ADHD strength
However, the last strength to come up which was mentioned by about a third of the interviewees I’ve actually not spoken about in all of my discussions on ADHD strengths on this channel but I love that it’s here because it’s one I personally relate to as well:
Six interviewees mentioned how they love mentoring and training others. And actually I see this in many of my clients. Clients that have been open about their neurodivergence at work and have ended up mentoring more junior neurodivergent colleagues. Clients that have put together coffee and cake events to enable them to check in on the wellbeing of their junior colleagues.
It’s also probably why I went into coaching. I’m an incredibly driven person myself but I also love helping others succeed and coaching enables me to do that even beyond my own experience. The majority of people I coach have more career experience than I do, they’re also usually in industries different to my own background, but through my approach of exploring their perspective and finding out what the right answer is for them I can help them reach new heights in their career and I genuinely love it.
From when I was a fresh grad mentoring new juniors, mentoring has always been my favourite part of my career.
What managers think of their ADHD employees
As part of the study, four managers were asked about these strengths in regards to ADHD in software engineering. The discussion here basically says that the management mostly agreed with both the strengths and challenges presented but something that was really interesting was that one of the managers explicitly stated that some of their best workers had ADHD and their profiles would match with most of the reported strengths.
Of course the paper is quick to point out that correlation is not causation and of course I agree with that, however I do think it highlights that while our challenges can hold us back, the benefits we bring as well can be more than worth it.
And I think that’s something that I really want to highlight. Because, spoiler alert, I’ll be back in the next post talking about the challenges we face in software engineering and how to overcome them but what I really want to conclude here is that it’s worth overcoming those challenges. Because when given the space to thrive, we’re truly amazing human beings.
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References
Stack Overflow Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone
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