This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now.
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.
> 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.
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 We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.
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.
They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour.
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.
The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour.
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.
But surely you experienced the fact that being paid a salary is a matter of contract, while being evaluated (formally and informally) for productivity is not independent of time. The company may find it valuable on the net to waste your time with distractions and bad process, but your manager may not know it and think you're just lazy.
I have certainly experienced management that took many actions which reduced productivity.
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!
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO.
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.
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to.
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.
I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm.
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.
My most productive ever was being in a room of 2-4 people working on the same thing. Small conversations were encouraged but anything unrelated was taken outside.
It’s magic isn’t it! And then it’s gone, and you realize you didn’t appreciate it for what it was when you had it. I am sure i will say this about youth when i am older (still) too ;)
Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.
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.
I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle.
Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
When I got the opportunity to build out an office for my own startup, I had it designed with different environments: an open office in the front, a big conference room, a few medium size rooms (for solo focus, meetings, or temporary workgroups), a café/meeting area in the back, and a nap room in the quietest corner (with a couch). All the meeting rooms had a big screen TV to connect to meeting rooms in our other office.
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.
"Opt in" is exactly what I expect of people when I need help. The closest implementation of your white board is me using Teams to DM people for help - when they have time.
The expectation is they'd reply once they're free instead of instantly replying with a meeting invite.
I’m quite the opposite. Whiteboards are terrible. The most productive and aligned teams I’ve ever worked on formed on irc. We don’t even know each others’ first names.
It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO.
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.
for me, #3 is the ideal, but communication and collaboration being primarily async is the key. face to face has a place but 90% of the time it “could/should have been an email”, and just exhausts me like nothing else… (“high functioning” AuDHDer)
i don’t see how leadership has anything to do with it, at least any more than any other collaborating members of the team. all parties need “good enough” communication skills, which can be learned (to an extent). poor communication skills regardless of in office or remote will tank a project and if systemic, a company
Because in a fully remote environment it is easy to default to having transactional relationships and only when a job responsibility requires them. Just like I do with a customer service rep.
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.
i have many personal connections to my remote colleagues, but i don’t see how that’s required or relevant for going beyond “transactional” work. i could be off base, but i think you mean working the minimum that is required for getting “the job done”. depending on your intended work life balance, this may or may not be a desirable outcome. obviously employers want more, but that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to it. most things in life are transactional, at least from my experience. ymmv
The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.
As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be.
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.
That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.
Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane.
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.
Remote work did a number on middle management. When many of them realized that if they aren't the strategic brain at the top, and they aren't individual contributers, and they can supervise butts in chais, then they aren't actually providing that much value.
So adapt. Learn to curate your team and their work. Lead by helping people organize, getting obstacles out of their way, shielding them from alarmist BS from higher management, and stop worrying about butts in seats. Focus on agreements, goals, commitments, accountability, growth, and coaching.
Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.
I don't prefer the in-person communication personally, but I know it's more productive for me, so I do it and end up preferring it. The same way I prefer clean code; it makes my and the companies life easier. Makes more money. I'm German, and it's painfully obvious.
Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.
That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.
I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.
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.
I’m part of the minority of folks who think the value of in office outweighs the cost. Particularly amongst those who aren’t in management.
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.
I mean, not just the people who ensure ICs show up to work and complete their task, but the people who are responsible for determining strategy, vision, and direction.
Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.
I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course.
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 pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.
The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for.
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.
People used to have phone calls for this! It was on the way out even 15 years ago, but a simple telephone call can get people unblocked pretty efficiently
But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work.
Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?
Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.
I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office.
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.
I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.
God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit.
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?
Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.
The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.
An online application of this principle is Focusmate, where you schedule calls with essentially random strangers and just work together. There's very little chit chat and it's not some weird front for a hookup scheme. I've been amazed at how well it works for me. I can't really explain why, after all the other person can't see my screen so I could just be doom scrolling YouTube the whole time, but for some reason I don't. I don't use it all the time, but when I need to get something unappealing done I still use it. I've also used it for exercise, and I've had partners use it for all sorts of weird things that they had been procrastinating. I highly recommend it, I thought it would be far weirder than it turned out to be, and it's really useful.
I 2nd focusmate. I feel like it creates an unwritten contract with my partner when I state my goals for the session. If I get distracted I'm disappointing more than myself.
The more I work with a partner the easier it is to work with focus too. Though I feel it can be double edged sword in some instances where I feel like I owe people progress. Though I feel that's probably a me problem.
Once you've got a few regular partners Focusmate blossoms.
I used https://www.flow.club/ which i found very helpful, they do small groups rather than one on one, and you can sign up ahead of time or join spontaneously
I could have written this. I have ADHD and I've done 500+ FocusMate sessions in the last year. I've found it sticky and helpful like nothing else I've ever tried, and I can't even explain why. It just feels like some kind of brain hack.
There was a recent discussion about body doubling on HN. One of the theories is that prior to modernity, people mostly worked together and that’s how we are wired. Doubly so for us ADHD people, who would tend to partake in hunting, war or such activities.
I've used it for writing sessions and just knocking out random life admin stuff I've been avoiding forever. Definitely not something I use every day, but when I'm stuck, it helps way more than I expected
Hey, you can share your screen in Focusmate. I also started doing body doubling with Focusmate & Focus101 since a month or so, I read about it on HN. Agreed its extremely effective (I have ADHD too). I alternate between the two services so I can stay on the free tiers ;)
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 may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of hours and my focus was being severy affected. I even considered quitting and looking for something else. As a last resort I started listening to white noise. I’ve been using white noise (white+brown+pink) for about a year now and find that it helps not only with cancelling out the noise but with focus and staying on task in general. I even use it at home at times. I know this may not be useful for everybody but I’m sure it could help out some of you. I use https://noises.online/ and mix all the types of white noise at the same time for maximim coverage but any type of white noise generator would do. To me it feels like being close to a waterfall. At first my ears hurt a bit after a few hours of white noise but got used to it after a while.
Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders.
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.
In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems.
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.
I developed some significant executive functioning issues over the past 15 years. The symptoms started shortly after I started taking bipolar 2 medications.
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%.
Rather than stream noise over the network, I've generated it locally with either Sox or Chuck. I've since lost the Chuck script, but this is one for Sox:
as an AuDHDer, noise cancellation and white noise are critical for my mental health (at work and elsewhere), but near constant _interruptions_ of my flow state by coworkers in the same physical space causes me almost visceral pain, and has only been amplified to unsustainable levels (for me) from forced RTO. I started fully remote at my current employer, so I communicate effectively and prolifically on async comm channels like slack, but even that can get to distractible levels for me. I recently implemented schedulable “office hours” for folks to access my time, so we’ll see if that helps in either case.
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…
if my post above resonates with you, i can say from personal experience that inaction and carrying on the status quo (continual masking, enduring the “pain”, etc) inevitably leads to burnout and possible further mental and physical health complications. Please don’t just “tough it out”, you won’t like the end results. It takes a toll on you physically and mentally that can take months or years to recover from (if you ever do)
Unless is a very small company you won't be the only one with this problem and management should do something about if it drains your energy which long-term will cause you health problems.
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.
Not ADHD (as far as I know), but I'm terribly prone to procrastination. I too find white noise helpful - I use and would recommemd an Android app called "A Soft Murmer" which lets you have rain noise and throws in a rumble of thunder etc. from time to time.
I feel the same about being drained with noises.
I use white noise too. But make sure to only use white noise when I want to focus, as it feels like I've conditioned myself to be focused when it's on.
Previously, I had it permanently on and I found the effectiveness dropped
That actually sounds super familiar... I've had a similar experience with noisy work environments just tanking my energy and focus. White noise is such an underrated lifesaver. It's wild how something so simple can create that mental "bubble" where your brain finally chills out enough to focus.
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations.
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.
Nice job. I played with the industrial set (grouping) and it worked well. The groupings concept looks good. And the intensity adjusting is an interesting concept. I've tried or signed up for a lot of ambient sites over the years, and this one definitely introduces a few concepts I haven't previously seen. Good luck!
For some reason I don't hear anything in Safari on macOS. I tried disabling all of my browser-based content blockers. I see the 'audio playing' icon but I don't hear anything.
Interesting. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the Human playlist, especially the High setting with those percussive sounds that were quite grating at first. I could easily see myself getting in a productive trance to that. It reminded me of why I like techno, drone, and ambient music. I'm surprised how well BPM Forest worked too. Imo it could use some variety in kicks and longer forest/rain loops.
Thanks for checking it out. It could definitely use larger library of sounds in general.
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'.
There’s an app/service called Endel which makes music I find helpful for focus too. My family finds it eerily void and dead, like it’s technically music but lacks any soul. I don’t mind; I don’t listen to it for entertainment. It’s like the white noise.
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.
1. I hope you're saying your ears hurt from physically wearing headphones, not from volume.
2. Many responses in this thread self-diagnose with many disorders because of the need to wear headphones in an open office environment. Open office environments are like emergency rooms filled with crying babies -- they feel almost intended to distract. This is true of "baseline", "normal", "non-disordered", whatever the codeword of the day is for average humans.
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.
White noise and similar soundscapes (rain, water…) help me focus much better than pure silence.
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.
I actually wrote my diploma theses for 6 month in a very crowded student bar / café . I didn't even suspected such diagnosis, but I guess it is not so much about diagnosis as finding the things that work. A former colleague always had TV series on while working. Brains are sometimes strange. Also now beyond 45, it seems I have to find new things that work for me.
Notifications need to be off if you’re doing focused work, and good managers will not only know this, but support you in it, or even expect you to set this boundary in order to do your best work.
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.
I have my notifications for Slack and Outlook turned off. I get a Dock tile badge, and Slack does ping my wrist via smartwatch, but not much else. Most emails I get are not vitally important, nor do most of the things I get on Slack immediately required reading or actionable.
I’m sure this works for some people. Personally I loathe social interaction of any kind, and mixing that with engineering gets me to my mental/emotional limits much faster.
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.
Whenever I read about pair programming as a standard technique (like XP) it sounds so great in theory but in practice I find it extremely draining whenever I’ve dabbled.
If you have psychological safety and develop a bond of trust with the person it is far less draining. Those things need to be developed and the working environment needs to make them possible, though.
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.
It also depends on the person and the problem and the problem. :)
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.
In general I agree but with a caveat: for me it's draining when there is a big difference in thought speed/way of thinking between me and my peer. If I'm with someone "on the same page" we can achieve awesome results, but if OTOH I have to explain why my brain just jumped to that other part, give context etc this is terribly draining for me as well, and after a 2 hours session I'm out for 2-3 hours when I need to recharge.
Yeah, I find it specially frustrating to do it with a slow reader. Like, in 2 seconds I can scan the page and see that what I need isn't there, and the other person is there taking like 1 minute to read everything... Or the opposite, there is the keyword jumping at my eyes and the other person takes so long to even find it. There's also the whole issue of the person not wanting to discuss about anything deeper other than the task immediately at hand.
But when I do with someone faster and that actually likes to discuss the implications, philosophy behind what we're doing it's amazing
Like other bad ideas (TDD) it seemed to rise to prominence during the heydey of Ruby and untyped JS, when it was so much easier to fuck everything up. I think lots of managers haven't written a line of code since then and still hold such a cargo cult mentality about prescribing it.
It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
Same here. I started an in-office job recently as the company’s highest ranking engineer and my productivity has plummeted vs WFH.
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.
What you see as an interruption is somebody else clearing their path. It could be that your personal productivity drop is resulting in a productivity gain for the group.
Idk, was diagnosed very young and haven’t seen anyone professionally about it as an adult. Tbh I didn’t know there were different subtypes until your comment.
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
Not the OP, but I have the "yeah you have ADHD according to this survey" from my GP, along with an adderall Rx. I didn't know there were documented subtypes.
Honestly, your solo workflow sounds super efficient. If you've found a rhythm that lets you focus and stay productive without burning out, that's gold.
My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room. I am a slob otherwise. But something about that, it gives me a chance to be away from "online" while also giving me a sort of mental "space"/distraction so I'm not focused/anxious/worried and seems to help me reduce my "executive dysfunction". I also have a tendency to place self-demands and so it makes me doing things I want to do (not like cleaning room but projects) more difficulty because I feel the pressure to do it, so I resist. Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
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...
>My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room.
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.
I wfh pretty much 100%, and have inattentive adhd. I’ll occasionally go spend a day at a WeWork, either with other workmates, or by myself.
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.
I have a similar phenomenon - I wfh and if my wife is home while I try to work I find it more difficult to get in the zone than if I’m home alone. But if I go to a coworking space with others around I find it easier.
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.
The last time I had a sort-of externally imposed schedule was at school. At university, attendance wasn’t required, nobody cared as long as I passed the tests. Since then, which is over 20 years ago, I have exclusively worked jobs that are WFH, with teams on various time zones and frequent travel (for others, not me), so everybody is used to scheduling calls via doodle etc.
> What would chi have to do with a body double? The body double might be a chi balancer or protective barrier helping to contain and calm the energy in and around the person with ADHD.
Does the writer believe that, or are they pandering?
In modern terms, it is nervous system co-regulation, and, yes, that’s a thing.
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‘.
Really interesting method. I've been calling a similar strategy the library effect. Whenever I work in an environment where other people are productive (or at least look productive) I can focus much better and get in the zone. It's now gotten to a point where I'm actively seeking desks with my screen exposed to the room, so people would be able to see me procrastinate, guilt tripping me to limit this sort of behavior.
This used to work for me, but not anymore. The less I care about what other people think the more I don’t care about procrastinating even when they’re right next to me.
> Really interesting method. I've been calling a similar strategy the library effect
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.
> It's now gotten to a point where I'm actively seeking desks with my screen exposed to the room, so people would be able to see me procrastinate, guilt tripping me to limit this sort of behavior.
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.
I find coworking spaces with other people around hits on thos effect. You don’t even have to be near the people, just in the same area.
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.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Seeing paid services like Focusmate, Flow Club and Focus101 show the basic idea is attractive enough to make into a lifestyle sized business.
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.
The podcast Science Vs just had an ADHD episode. They talk about body doubling and a bunch of other ADHD stuff.
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.
I'm nearly certain that the images and the text are AI generated from other sources and perhaps tweaked a bit. The headings are the giveaway. Low signal-to-noise ratio.
Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN
The article says it was originally written in 1996. It's on the site of the Attention Deficit Disorders Association. The images are generic stock photography.
Yep, my sister makes fun of me that her mere presence makes me more productive. (when I shared an apartment with her in my early thirties) she'd sit in my room just chatting to me and I would tidy and clean without her doing anything, whereas I'd been meaning to do that for months.
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
My most productive period within the last 12 months was when I rented a desk in a co-working space for the summer so that I could catch up with a friend who also went there.
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.
> I could pull this off only because my commute was short
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.
Body doubles work especially well for tasks that involve changing visual context and sequencing.
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.
I have a family member who does this. But I think it's more because they've fallen down an internet rabbit hole which has basically removed all personal autonomy. They just do it because everyone else is doing it. It's just called working with someone else.
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.
This is super interesting. I can only speak anecdotally but my older brother has ADD and he has already spent 4-5 weeks writing a powershell script to automate a trivial task at work.
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.
In my 40s and I’ve recently been diagnosed with inattentive adhd. TFA makes a lot of sense to me given I’m one of the rare people at my company who commutes to the office every day even though we are an in-person optional workplace. Whenever I’ve had to WFH, I’ve struggled massively to gain an initial focus. Although medication has helped tremendously, I still feel much more productive in an office setting.
Strangely I’ve found myself to be something like 400% more productive when pair programming.
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.
Pair programming flummoxes me because I find it significantly harder to concentrate when someone's watching. It's like having that execrable old Visual Basic feature where it flags up syntax errors if you cursor off a line, forcing you to correct the errors before moving to a different line. Except now implemented with a smelly human flagging up the errors!
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.
My personal experience with pair programming is that I first was very intimidated by it and instinctively hated it
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
There is very little evidence for this. IMO, it is feel good advice that sounds right.
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:
> 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
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.
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.
> 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).
> Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns.
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.
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.
What is at all strange about wanting to work near other people so you keep each other motivated to remain focused? It's not magic, and it's not a treatment for ADHD (nor a replacement for such). It's just a common sense response to living in an age where everyone works from home isolated. Some people just work better with company.
> 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.
I’ve never really understood the hype around pair programming. In practice, it’s usually just sitting with a coworker who wants to chat and crack jokes while working. That’s fine socially, but I don’t see any productivity gains.
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.
* 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?
I already get those benefits from focused pre-coding discussions and pull request reviews. They allow for high-quality decisions, involve more perspectives, and are asynchronous.
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.
No. You dont. The feedback cadence is then wildly stretched out.
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.
That kind of aligns with Guy Steele's experience pair programming... with Richard Stallman: "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
I love how something so low-tech like just sitting next to someone can short-circuit the ADHD chaos spiral. Like, no fancy app, no productivity hack, just a warm body in a chair nearby. It's kind of beautiful.
I don't necessarily need someone there all the time. But talking it out really helps when I need get over that hump and get going on some annoying problem.
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.
Focusmate is probably the most popular tool in this category. I don't like the other ones, I am more comfortable in a 1-1 video session rather than multiple people. It works really well when I want to force myself to get something done.
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.
Ich muss mich aber fragen warum dies nötig wurde.
Niemand an meiner Schule hatte eine Allergie, Erkrankung dieser Art oder irgendwas.
Was ist seit den 1980ern passiert?
Sind es Umweltgifte? Farb- und Aromastoffe? Zuviel Süsses?
Ich kann es mir kaum vorstellen dass das menschliche Erbgut so kaputt gegangen ist.
Wir haben eine exzellente medizinische Versorgung und Forschung und Entwicklung gehabt.
Mein Frau lehrt an einer Waldorf-Schule. Die Kinder leiden wirklich keinen Hunger und Not.
Leider aber werden viele Kinder gekündigt da sie verhaltensauffällig und somit unbeschulbar sind.
Es kann doch nicht sein, ich würde es verstehen wenn die pure Armut oder Gewalt in der Familie die Kinder kaputtmacht.
Sind es die Smartphones?
Wow - I actually do this - did not know it had a name but pairing up with someone actually makes it easier (although loads of coders I know dislike working with others - so pair programming is an attempt to do this technique without knowing who has adhd or not?
It may not work for you, but... kinda, yes. My most productive days are while waiting for the periodic car checkup at the dealer and it's effectively an open office environment. But no, an actual open office every day would not give the same result. Brains be weird.
This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now.
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.
> 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.
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.
Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.
My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.
Thank you for moderating and clarifying a bit.
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.
They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour.
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.
I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known.
Do you work in HR?
The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour.
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.
> Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack?
This has got to be an ADA violation for someone with ADHD.
Not that it matters anymore.
This has sincerely not been my experience, even as my role has blended into management adjacency over the years.
But surely you experienced the fact that being paid a salary is a matter of contract, while being evaluated (formally and informally) for productivity is not independent of time. The company may find it valuable on the net to waste your time with distractions and bad process, but your manager may not know it and think you're just lazy.
I have certainly experienced management that took many actions which reduced productivity.
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!
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO.
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.
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to.
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.
I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm.
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.
My most productive ever was being in a room of 2-4 people working on the same thing. Small conversations were encouraged but anything unrelated was taken outside.
I wish I could find that again.
It’s magic isn’t it! And then it’s gone, and you realize you didn’t appreciate it for what it was when you had it. I am sure i will say this about youth when i am older (still) too ;)
Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.
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.
I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle.
Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
When I got the opportunity to build out an office for my own startup, I had it designed with different environments: an open office in the front, a big conference room, a few medium size rooms (for solo focus, meetings, or temporary workgroups), a café/meeting area in the back, and a nap room in the quietest corner (with a couch). All the meeting rooms had a big screen TV to connect to meeting rooms in our other office.
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.
Are these jobs at all attainable by people of unremarkable intelligence and aptitude?
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.
"Opt in" is exactly what I expect of people when I need help. The closest implementation of your white board is me using Teams to DM people for help - when they have time. The expectation is they'd reply once they're free instead of instantly replying with a meeting invite.
I’m quite the opposite. Whiteboards are terrible. The most productive and aligned teams I’ve ever worked on formed on irc. We don’t even know each others’ first names.
Imagine if the Linux kernel took this approach.
Lol, that sounds like hell on earth to me. Do they allow anything for Autistic people? or similar?
Cause that's just... the worst.
It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO.
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.
for me, #3 is the ideal, but communication and collaboration being primarily async is the key. face to face has a place but 90% of the time it “could/should have been an email”, and just exhausts me like nothing else… (“high functioning” AuDHDer)
The trouble with 3 is that while achievable, it requires an incredibly high degree of intentionality and strong leadership.
i don’t see how leadership has anything to do with it, at least any more than any other collaborating members of the team. all parties need “good enough” communication skills, which can be learned (to an extent). poor communication skills regardless of in office or remote will tank a project and if systemic, a company
Because in a fully remote environment it is easy to default to having transactional relationships and only when a job responsibility requires them. Just like I do with a customer service rep.
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.
i have many personal connections to my remote colleagues, but i don’t see how that’s required or relevant for going beyond “transactional” work. i could be off base, but i think you mean working the minimum that is required for getting “the job done”. depending on your intended work life balance, this may or may not be a desirable outcome. obviously employers want more, but that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to it. most things in life are transactional, at least from my experience. ymmv
1 and 3 both do.
Certainly
But the bar is even higher for 3 than 1 and likelihood of it occurring organically lower.
The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.
As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be.
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.
That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.
Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane.
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.
Remote work did a number on middle management. When many of them realized that if they aren't the strategic brain at the top, and they aren't individual contributers, and they can supervise butts in chais, then they aren't actually providing that much value.
So adapt. Learn to curate your team and their work. Lead by helping people organize, getting obstacles out of their way, shielding them from alarmist BS from higher management, and stop worrying about butts in seats. Focus on agreements, goals, commitments, accountability, growth, and coaching.
It's not that hard.
Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.
I don't prefer the in-person communication personally, but I know it's more productive for me, so I do it and end up preferring it. The same way I prefer clean code; it makes my and the companies life easier. Makes more money. I'm German, and it's painfully obvious.
Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.
That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.
I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.
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.
I’m part of the minority of folks who think the value of in office outweighs the cost. Particularly amongst those who aren’t in management.
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.
That you say “two levels” suggests formal hierarchy, which is management.
I mean, not just the people who ensure ICs show up to work and complete their task, but the people who are responsible for determining strategy, vision, and direction.
Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.
> the value of in office outweighs the cost
For who? Your employer keeps all the value and only employees pay the cost. Why would I want this as an employee?
Bingo if you are in your late 20s or early 30s. But then life and priorities change...
I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course.
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.
Volunteer for something your interested in locally on the side. It's the only way I stay sane.
I pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.
The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for.
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.
People used to have phone calls for this! It was on the way out even 15 years ago, but a simple telephone call can get people unblocked pretty efficiently
But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work.
Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?
Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.
I work far more effectively remotely in isolation.
The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.
I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office.
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.
Yeah I spent 2 hours in commute to attend Teams calls.. yay?
I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.
God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit.
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?
You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger.
Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.
If the AI is any good, it won't need the stool samples: it can infer all that data well enough just from your webcam.
“Privacy regulations aren’t important, because I have nothing to hide.”
The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.
An online application of this principle is Focusmate, where you schedule calls with essentially random strangers and just work together. There's very little chit chat and it's not some weird front for a hookup scheme. I've been amazed at how well it works for me. I can't really explain why, after all the other person can't see my screen so I could just be doom scrolling YouTube the whole time, but for some reason I don't. I don't use it all the time, but when I need to get something unappealing done I still use it. I've also used it for exercise, and I've had partners use it for all sorts of weird things that they had been procrastinating. I highly recommend it, I thought it would be far weirder than it turned out to be, and it's really useful.
I 2nd focusmate. I feel like it creates an unwritten contract with my partner when I state my goals for the session. If I get distracted I'm disappointing more than myself. The more I work with a partner the easier it is to work with focus too. Though I feel it can be double edged sword in some instances where I feel like I owe people progress. Though I feel that's probably a me problem.
Once you've got a few regular partners Focusmate blossoms.
I used https://www.flow.club/ which i found very helpful, they do small groups rather than one on one, and you can sign up ahead of time or join spontaneously
I could have written this. I have ADHD and I've done 500+ FocusMate sessions in the last year. I've found it sticky and helpful like nothing else I've ever tried, and I can't even explain why. It just feels like some kind of brain hack.
There was a recent discussion about body doubling on HN. One of the theories is that prior to modernity, people mostly worked together and that’s how we are wired. Doubly so for us ADHD people, who would tend to partake in hunting, war or such activities.
I've used it for writing sessions and just knocking out random life admin stuff I've been avoiding forever. Definitely not something I use every day, but when I'm stuck, it helps way more than I expected
Hey, you can share your screen in Focusmate. I also started doing body doubling with Focusmate & Focus101 since a month or so, I read about it on HN. Agreed its extremely effective (I have ADHD too). I alternate between the two services so I can stay on the free tiers ;)
I’ve used focusmate on and off. Need to use it more.
It’s not perfect for keeping me on task, but does at least keep me at my desk.
There are free discord groups for this too
https://discord.com/invite/study
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.
also perhaps coworking streams on twitch https://www.twitch.tv/directory/all/tags/CoWorking
Care to share some, friend?
Very curious about this
I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of hours and my focus was being severy affected. I even considered quitting and looking for something else. As a last resort I started listening to white noise. I’ve been using white noise (white+brown+pink) for about a year now and find that it helps not only with cancelling out the noise but with focus and staying on task in general. I even use it at home at times. I know this may not be useful for everybody but I’m sure it could help out some of you. I use https://noises.online/ and mix all the types of white noise at the same time for maximim coverage but any type of white noise generator would do. To me it feels like being close to a waterfall. At first my ears hurt a bit after a few hours of white noise but got used to it after a while.
Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders.
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.
> Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological
The word “beyond” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence (I say as someone with the same diagnosis)
In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems.
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.
I developed some significant executive functioning issues over the past 15 years. The symptoms started shortly after I started taking bipolar 2 medications.
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%.
Rather than stream noise over the network, I've generated it locally with either Sox or Chuck. I've since lost the Chuck script, but this is one for Sox:
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
Brown noise in Chuck. Adjust the filter cutoff (freq) to your desired comfort level.
as an AuDHDer, noise cancellation and white noise are critical for my mental health (at work and elsewhere), but near constant _interruptions_ of my flow state by coworkers in the same physical space causes me almost visceral pain, and has only been amplified to unsustainable levels (for me) from forced RTO. I started fully remote at my current employer, so I communicate effectively and prolifically on async comm channels like slack, but even that can get to distractible levels for me. I recently implemented schedulable “office hours” for folks to access my time, so we’ll see if that helps in either case.
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…
You're using "AuDHD" quite liberally, is this a serious portmanteau you've adopted as a label after getting diagnosed for both or either?
i have a formal diagnosis for both, and yes this is a common abbreviation used within the autistic + adhd community.
edit: i probably should have lead with what that abbreviation meant, but although counterintuitive they’re common comorbidities
if my post above resonates with you, i can say from personal experience that inaction and carrying on the status quo (continual masking, enduring the “pain”, etc) inevitably leads to burnout and possible further mental and physical health complications. Please don’t just “tough it out”, you won’t like the end results. It takes a toll on you physically and mentally that can take months or years to recover from (if you ever do)
Unless is a very small company you won't be the only one with this problem and management should do something about if it drains your energy which long-term will cause you health problems.
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
Not ADHD (as far as I know), but I'm terribly prone to procrastination. I too find white noise helpful - I use and would recommemd an Android app called "A Soft Murmer" which lets you have rain noise and throws in a rumble of thunder etc. from time to time.
I feel the same about being drained with noises. I use white noise too. But make sure to only use white noise when I want to focus, as it feels like I've conditioned myself to be focused when it's on. Previously, I had it permanently on and I found the effectiveness dropped
That actually sounds super familiar... I've had a similar experience with noisy work environments just tanking my energy and focus. White noise is such an underrated lifesaver. It's wild how something so simple can create that mental "bubble" where your brain finally chills out enough to focus.
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations.
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.
Nice job. I played with the industrial set (grouping) and it worked well. The groupings concept looks good. And the intensity adjusting is an interesting concept. I've tried or signed up for a lot of ambient sites over the years, and this one definitely introduces a few concepts I haven't previously seen. Good luck!
For some reason I don't hear anything in Safari on macOS. I tried disabling all of my browser-based content blockers. I see the 'audio playing' icon but I don't hear anything.
Oh, I'll check what's going on in Safari. Thanks for the report, if you could forward me if there's any error in console, I'd greatly appreciate it.
It's especially surprising if the 'audio playing' icon is there, since that should be coming from the browser itself.
Interesting. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the Human playlist, especially the High setting with those percussive sounds that were quite grating at first. I could easily see myself getting in a productive trance to that. It reminded me of why I like techno, drone, and ambient music. I'm surprised how well BPM Forest worked too. Imo it could use some variety in kicks and longer forest/rain loops.
Thanks for checking it out. It could definitely use larger library of sounds in general.
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'.
There’s an app/service called Endel which makes music I find helpful for focus too. My family finds it eerily void and dead, like it’s technically music but lacks any soul. I don’t mind; I don’t listen to it for entertainment. It’s like the white noise.
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.
1. I hope you're saying your ears hurt from physically wearing headphones, not from volume. 2. Many responses in this thread self-diagnose with many disorders because of the need to wear headphones in an open office environment. Open office environments are like emergency rooms filled with crying babies -- they feel almost intended to distract. This is true of "baseline", "normal", "non-disordered", whatever the codeword of the day is for average humans.
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.
White noise and similar soundscapes (rain, water…) help me focus much better than pure silence.
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.
I actually wrote my diploma theses for 6 month in a very crowded student bar / café . I didn't even suspected such diagnosis, but I guess it is not so much about diagnosis as finding the things that work. A former colleague always had TV series on while working. Brains are sometimes strange. Also now beyond 45, it seems I have to find new things that work for me.
> my ears hurt a bit after a few hours of white noise
Seems like something that could lead to permanent hearing damage
Here's an HN submission from 2022 that I have bookmarked. NYT: Can Brown Noise Turn Off Your Brain?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998960
What do you do about notifications from Slack/Emails/Teams messages?
Notifications need to be off if you’re doing focused work, and good managers will not only know this, but support you in it, or even expect you to set this boundary in order to do your best work.
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.
I have my notifications for Slack and Outlook turned off. I get a Dock tile badge, and Slack does ping my wrist via smartwatch, but not much else. Most emails I get are not vitally important, nor do most of the things I get on Slack immediately required reading or actionable.
Not OP, but it's good to turn them off for sessions of focus. They can, almost always, wait.
Process The Comms Async.
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 like to listen to https://coffitivity.com to stay concentrated.
These don't work for me. My brain knows I'm deceiving it, so it doesn't respond to this kind of stimulation.
MyNoise.Net is also very good.
I’m sure this works for some people. Personally I loathe social interaction of any kind, and mixing that with engineering gets me to my mental/emotional limits much faster.
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.
Whenever I read about pair programming as a standard technique (like XP) it sounds so great in theory but in practice I find it extremely draining whenever I’ve dabbled.
If you have psychological safety and develop a bond of trust with the person it is far less draining. Those things need to be developed and the working environment needs to make them possible, though.
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.
It also depends on the person and the problem and the problem. :)
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.
Probably the most stressful portion of my career was when I was doing mandatory pair programming in a shop where the manager came from Thoughtworks.
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.
In general I agree but with a caveat: for me it's draining when there is a big difference in thought speed/way of thinking between me and my peer. If I'm with someone "on the same page" we can achieve awesome results, but if OTOH I have to explain why my brain just jumped to that other part, give context etc this is terribly draining for me as well, and after a 2 hours session I'm out for 2-3 hours when I need to recharge.
Yeah, I find it specially frustrating to do it with a slow reader. Like, in 2 seconds I can scan the page and see that what I need isn't there, and the other person is there taking like 1 minute to read everything... Or the opposite, there is the keyword jumping at my eyes and the other person takes so long to even find it. There's also the whole issue of the person not wanting to discuss about anything deeper other than the task immediately at hand.
But when I do with someone faster and that actually likes to discuss the implications, philosophy behind what we're doing it's amazing
Like other bad ideas (TDD) it seemed to rise to prominence during the heydey of Ruby and untyped JS, when it was so much easier to fuck everything up. I think lots of managers haven't written a line of code since then and still hold such a cargo cult mentality about prescribing it.
It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
Same here. I started an in-office job recently as the company’s highest ranking engineer and my productivity has plummeted vs WFH.
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.
What you see as an interruption is somebody else clearing their path. It could be that your personal productivity drop is resulting in a productivity gain for the group.
Are you in an open office? I found that to be extremely fatiguing relative to a private office, a shared office, or even a cubicle.
What type of ADHD do you have? Primarily inattentive, hyperactive-impulsive, or combined?
Idk, was diagnosed very young and haven’t seen anyone professionally about it as an adult. Tbh I didn’t know there were different subtypes until your comment.
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
Not the OP, but I have the "yeah you have ADHD according to this survey" from my GP, along with an adderall Rx. I didn't know there were documented subtypes.
Honestly, your solo workflow sounds super efficient. If you've found a rhythm that lets you focus and stay productive without burning out, that's gold.
Wish I could read it. The menu stays open on Firefox even if you hit the X.
https://imgur.com/a/T6tY7dc
I could read it using the reader view
Sometimes it needs those constructive comments. Thanks, this worked for me.
I blocked the menu using Ublock Origin.
My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room. I am a slob otherwise. But something about that, it gives me a chance to be away from "online" while also giving me a sort of mental "space"/distraction so I'm not focused/anxious/worried and seems to help me reduce my "executive dysfunction". I also have a tendency to place self-demands and so it makes me doing things I want to do (not like cleaning room but projects) more difficulty because I feel the pressure to do it, so I resist. Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
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...
>My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room.
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.
I wfh pretty much 100%, and have inattentive adhd. I’ll occasionally go spend a day at a WeWork, either with other workmates, or by myself.
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.
I have a similar phenomenon - I wfh and if my wife is home while I try to work I find it more difficult to get in the zone than if I’m home alone. But if I go to a coworking space with others around I find it easier.
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.
I just want to get to work from 10pm to 4am. Just me my music and the night highway / city /nature sounds. Anything is possible in that timeframe.
Too bad this is incompatible with the society. So we got to pay the context switching tax.
The last time I had a sort-of externally imposed schedule was at school. At university, attendance wasn’t required, nobody cared as long as I passed the tests. Since then, which is over 20 years ago, I have exclusively worked jobs that are WFH, with teams on various time zones and frequent travel (for others, not me), so everybody is used to scheduling calls via doodle etc.
> What would chi have to do with a body double? The body double might be a chi balancer or protective barrier helping to contain and calm the energy in and around the person with ADHD.
Does the writer believe that, or are they pandering?
In modern terms, it is nervous system co-regulation, and, yes, that’s a thing.
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‘.
Website overrides browser scroll behavior, forcing laggy (i.e. animated) scroll.
As such, it's extremely irritating.
Archive version[0] does not have such problem.
0. https://archive.is/r5SZc
Really interesting method. I've been calling a similar strategy the library effect. Whenever I work in an environment where other people are productive (or at least look productive) I can focus much better and get in the zone. It's now gotten to a point where I'm actively seeking desks with my screen exposed to the room, so people would be able to see me procrastinate, guilt tripping me to limit this sort of behavior.
This used to work for me, but not anymore. The less I care about what other people think the more I don’t care about procrastinating even when they’re right next to me.
> Really interesting method. I've been calling a similar strategy the library effect
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.
> It's now gotten to a point where I'm actively seeking desks with my screen exposed to the room, so people would be able to see me procrastinate, guilt tripping me to limit this sort of behavior.
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.
I find coworking spaces with other people around hits on thos effect. You don’t even have to be near the people, just in the same area.
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.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Seeing paid services like Focusmate, Flow Club and Focus101 show the basic idea is attractive enough to make into a lifestyle sized business.
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.
The podcast Science Vs just had an ADHD episode. They talk about body doubling and a bunch of other ADHD stuff.
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.
This article is clearly written to the word count and not the overall content. A painful read.
I'm nearly certain that the images and the text are AI generated from other sources and perhaps tweaked a bit. The headings are the giveaway. Low signal-to-noise ratio.
Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN
The article says it was originally written in 1996. It's on the site of the Attention Deficit Disorders Association. The images are generic stock photography.
If the URL claiming uploaded in 2015 can be believed (i.e. in the time before the Internet was 95% sewage), this could be that original article: https://www.gettingclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Body...
It's much more fucking concise than the drivel of the republished stuff.
> While there’s no research to prove its effectiveness [..]
> Originally published in 1996, this article was republished on February 20th, 2025.
Yep, my sister makes fun of me that her mere presence makes me more productive. (when I shared an apartment with her in my early thirties) she'd sit in my room just chatting to me and I would tidy and clean without her doing anything, whereas I'd been meaning to do that for months.
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
try “responsibilibuddy” :)
the term 'accountability partner' is used
This site (add.org) doesn't function on Firefox mobile.
I had to click Reader Mode to see it
My most productive period within the last 12 months was when I rented a desk in a co-working space for the summer so that I could catch up with a friend who also went there.
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.
> I could pull this off only because my commute was short
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.
Would be interesting to create a tool that efficiently matched people this way.
Body doubles work especially well for tasks that involve changing visual context and sequencing.
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.
I have a family member who does this. But I think it's more because they've fallen down an internet rabbit hole which has basically removed all personal autonomy. They just do it because everyone else is doing it. It's just called working with someone else.
There are a bunch of “study with me” videos on YouTube that aim to do a similar thing, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ex_bNIFR1A
Where does specialization end?
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.
This is super interesting. I can only speak anecdotally but my older brother has ADD and he has already spent 4-5 weeks writing a powershell script to automate a trivial task at work.
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.
In my 40s and I’ve recently been diagnosed with inattentive adhd. TFA makes a lot of sense to me given I’m one of the rare people at my company who commutes to the office every day even though we are an in-person optional workplace. Whenever I’ve had to WFH, I’ve struggled massively to gain an initial focus. Although medication has helped tremendously, I still feel much more productive in an office setting.
Requiring another person is a major issue.
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.
So did they just discover pair programming? :D
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
What's unique about this? This is basically what every parent and teacher already does.
True, but this is about adults in a professional context.
Strangely I’ve found myself to be something like 400% more productive when pair programming.
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.
Pair programming flummoxes me because I find it significantly harder to concentrate when someone's watching. It's like having that execrable old Visual Basic feature where it flags up syntax errors if you cursor off a line, forcing you to correct the errors before moving to a different line. Except now implemented with a smelly human flagging up the errors!
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.
My personal experience with pair programming is that I first was very intimidated by it and instinctively hated it
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
There is very little evidence for this. IMO, it is feel good advice that sounds right.
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...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Body%20Double%22%
> 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
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.
> So... you're basically saying it works?
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).
> Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns.
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.
> Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy,
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.
What is at all strange about wanting to work near other people so you keep each other motivated to remain focused? It's not magic, and it's not a treatment for ADHD (nor a replacement for such). It's just a common sense response to living in an age where everyone works from home isolated. Some people just work better with company.
> 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.
Yeah, I mean, saying stuff like this is polarizing.
Good points.
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.
I’ve never really understood the hype around pair programming. In practice, it’s usually just sitting with a coworker who wants to chat and crack jokes while working. That’s fine socially, but I don’t see any productivity gains.
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.
The productivity gains come from:
* 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?
I already get those benefits from focused pre-coding discussions and pull request reviews. They allow for high-quality decisions, involve more perspectives, and are asynchronous.
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.
No. You dont. The feedback cadence is then wildly stretched out.
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.
Absolutely same experience. It's quite draining but extremely effective.
That kind of aligns with Guy Steele's experience pair programming... with Richard Stallman: "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html
It helped that they were working on an interesting problem. Most problems that need solving are not interesting.
I love how something so low-tech like just sitting next to someone can short-circuit the ADHD chaos spiral. Like, no fancy app, no productivity hack, just a warm body in a chair nearby. It's kind of beautiful.
I don't necessarily need someone there all the time. But talking it out really helps when I need get over that hump and get going on some annoying problem.
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.
Couldn't see anything but the menu
I had to switch to reader mode. You're not missing much
Same here, but if this is because of Firefox mobile, then reader mode is the answer, at least it was for me.
Focusmate is probably the most popular tool in this category. I don't like the other ones, I am more comfortable in a 1-1 video session rather than multiple people. It works really well when I want to force myself to get something done.
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.
This is why childs in Germany get a Schulbegleiter. A person that just goes with the child to school
Ich muss mich aber fragen warum dies nötig wurde. Niemand an meiner Schule hatte eine Allergie, Erkrankung dieser Art oder irgendwas. Was ist seit den 1980ern passiert? Sind es Umweltgifte? Farb- und Aromastoffe? Zuviel Süsses? Ich kann es mir kaum vorstellen dass das menschliche Erbgut so kaputt gegangen ist. Wir haben eine exzellente medizinische Versorgung und Forschung und Entwicklung gehabt. Mein Frau lehrt an einer Waldorf-Schule. Die Kinder leiden wirklich keinen Hunger und Not. Leider aber werden viele Kinder gekündigt da sie verhaltensauffällig und somit unbeschulbar sind. Es kann doch nicht sein, ich würde es verstehen wenn die pure Armut oder Gewalt in der Familie die Kinder kaputtmacht. Sind es die Smartphones?
An einer Waldorfschule hast Du selection bias
Wow - I actually do this - did not know it had a name but pairing up with someone actually makes it easier (although loads of coders I know dislike working with others - so pair programming is an attempt to do this technique without knowing who has adhd or not?
Wow... I start reading the article, and just as I'm thinking, "This site might be helpful for finding tips on how to foc..."
...A popup slides into view in the lower right-hand corner.
That's when I closed the tab. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think you dropped this: \
https://www.focusmate.com/
I used this during the early pandemic and found it very useful
Not for my kid. Even sitting right next to her, she'll zone out and start doodling for hours unless we're on her every couple minutes.
Looks related to XP (Extreme Programming), but the problem is that you get tired and stressed way too fast to reap the benefits.
Yeah, nothing like an open office with random interruptions, noises, and movements to improve your focus.
It may not work for you, but... kinda, yes. My most productive days are while waiting for the periodic car checkup at the dealer and it's effectively an open office environment. But no, an actual open office every day would not give the same result. Brains be weird.
What browsers does this site support? It is broken on Firefox mobile.
Firefox mobile + read mode works
> The ADHB body double
Okay. Maybe I can apply this metaphorical technique
> You’re gonna need a literal body
I’m out.
Does having a cool calm collected cat next to you count?
So, this is basically what Mark is trying to do, isn't it? Building a metaverse where everyone can virtually body double.
That concept doesn't need metaverse. If you can body double with someone, you can do it over any communication medium.
So, basically schizos can cancel out their adhd?
yep. it works. SOMETIMES.