So this is probably my 3rd job in the last 2 years I have lost due to not being a good fit with my team. They were mostly contracting type work where within a few months I was able to hold the fort until it was over. With one of them, I didn’t have a good programming skills to survive so I fell behind in deadlines and my coworkers noticed, told PM, and he eventually got rid of me.

All managers have said, I am not a good fit and struggle to keep up with my teammates. Whenever there are meetings, I am either quiet, ask questions that are very basic level, struggling to contribute to meaningful ideas, or even fail to complete ticket items. Honestly, I feel lost every time to whatever they’re talking about.

I am not on meds I should say that. I pretty much have survived my life without them and livescribe audio pen, which helps me rewind meetings so I can understand whats going on. I generally do this after work hours and on my own. The livescribe pen is the only way I am able to play catchup and take good notes afterwords, and every morning I would review so I can play catch up or until it sinks in my head. It’s still not enough because I feel tired and am burning out, pushing myself too hard.

I don’t know what to do, do you have any suggestions or have someone has been in my situation? How do I NOT be that guy who’s not a good fit and always lost all the time. Should mention, Money is really tight right now and with no support, I am about to be out on the streets soon, I only have my car.

Good day r/ADHD_Programmers.

Around 2023 shortly after ChatGPT was released, I went full time traveling for 27 months and came back to one of the worst markets in over a decade. Fast forward 3.5 years after I left the market, I finally found a job again.

Before I left I was a Java Spring Boot Full Stack Engineer with Angular mostly as FE framework and also did a lot of DevOps stuff including Jenkins, K8s/Openshift, ArgoCD among others.

Now that I came back after 3.5 years I basically missed out on all those developments in tech and the hyper-fast progress due to AI. Luckily I was somewhat active in what was going on and also dabbled in the are of LLMs, so using current tools like claude-code, codex and so on are not foreign to me, but used in small scope private projects.

The issue I'm facing now is that we currently set up the project I will be working in the first time since I came back. It's a full agentic workflow with HITL using React as Frontend, NextJS as BFF and NestJS as backend. It's planned to use the Copilot CLI due to licensing and multi-step, multi-model workflow. The project will have weekly sprints and I'm mainly the only actual engineer and person working full-time. I already pre-built pretty rigorous gates both locally and via Github Action.

The main issue I'm facing and already notice during the setup is, that it's hard to deal with the massive context and brutal amount of information that AI prints out. I feel both AI fatigue, meaning at some points I just approve architecture documents when I need to proof read them and the same with pull requests and at the same time I feel lingering burnout, because I feel fully disabled after a day.

I'm also heavily afraid of skill atrophy, which is already an issue after not working professionally, but now especially with LLMs generating most of the code even more. Also it being a stack I only partly dabbled for a few days (React/Next) and partly never used (NestJS) where I need to approve the quality without knowing specific best practices for each framework.

Any tips on how to deal with that or how to work specifically (eg. 15 minute review springs then break)?

TL;DR: How to avoid AI fatigue and burnout while working with AI/LLMs and the task shifting to reviewing.

Cook time: 3 mins

Interviewer: opens door every 10 seconds to check temperature.

food(leetcode): still cold

interviewer: Microwave can't warm up food.

Having to explain my thoughts during an interview takes me out of the problem solving. All my focus shifts to pronouncing words, word retrieval, tone. Then I have to start at the top of the logic just to make it back to the same point. I run out of time for problems I have seen before.

Can I tell the interviewer to shut up, let me think?

Can I tell them I am a microwave?

While I am a programmer, a lot of data entry, data mapping and data cleanup tasks seems to fall on me. When I offload it, they make a bigger mess than I make. How do I even continue working when mistakes pop up and I have to take responsibility but at the same time clean them?

I know this sub sees a lot of these, here's one more 😅.

I've built TidyPath for the gap between "my room is overwhelmingly messy and I don't know what to do" and "I know exactly where to start." You'd give it a view of your room and it will tell you where to begin.

The idea came from my own struggles but I want to create something that others will find useful as well. It's currently in beta.

Feel free to try if you're interested:

Testflight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/98T5vtVB

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.tidypath