Why ADHD makes jobs hard

Learning patterns associated with ADHD makes you "spiky" - you are really good at some things and really bad at everything else. And most jobs require a combination of skills

In general I avoid mental health related content on social media - I’ve learnt over a period of time that whenever I read about others’ mental health issues, my own issues start flaring up as I try to empathise. The other issue is that mental health content is usually plagued with negativity, and there is no way one can feel good while going through all of this (so it’s in a sense ironical that I write this blog - it’s possible I myself wouldn’t be a reader of it, if I didn’t have to read it while writing and for editing purposes).

However, one exception I make to that rule is this Reddit community called “ADHD_Programmers”. I don’t even know why I joined it - because I’m not a programmer (well, I program, but I’m not much of a software engineer). In any case, I find it relatively benign and occasionally helpful and I continue to be on it.

One of the overarching themes of the community is posts about people losing their jobs, or getting laid off. I don’t know if there is selection bias here - people who lost their jobs are much more likely to talk about it than people who remain in their jobs, but one thing that remains is that ADHD makes it harder to do jobs.

And I have a hypothesis on it.

Focus and learning methods

Basically, with ADHD, your focus is binary. You can either hyperfocus (focus massively) on what you are doing, or you can be insanely distracted. In fact, if you look at all my blogposts, the better ones are usually those where I was hyperfocussed on them while I was writing, while the ones where I was distracted while writing (this is one of those) usually read pretty badly.

One offshoot of this is that when you have ADHD, you are either very good at something, or very bad at it. Extending this, you usually become really good at what you are good at (because you are able to hyperfocus on it), but you are really bad at everything else.

Recently I was talking to a friend who has also been diagnosed with ADHD, and he was talking about learning patterns. “Most people learn things linearly”, he said, “and that allows them to learn anything to a reasonable degree. The problem with us is that we learn with massive insights, and that makes it hard to learn well in things we are not really interested in”.

This is a good time to plug one very old video of mine. This is from 2004, and I had done a presentation as part of a management communication course.

The topic given to me had been “quality takes time” (or some such thing). This was a prepared talk. Note how I intuitively assume that the only way to solve a problem is by getting a “massive insight”. I’ve spoken that way then because that’s the only way I had known then to learn and solve problems.

Breaking the rules

The other day, I was thinking that I’m pretty bad at knowing when to break the rules. I don’t know when it is okay to interrupt someone. I don’t know when it is okay to lie. I don’t know when it is okay to cut the line somewhere. Anywhere you see what can be classified as an “unwritten rule”, it is a point of tension for me, since I don’t know when to follow or not follow it. It just doesn’t come intuitively to me.

A few weeks ago, I had planned to write one blogpost about “why ADHD makes you stick to rules”, and then I realised that this is not entirely true. In domains that I understand, I have an extremely intuitive understanding on when to break what rule.

I might despise pie charts, but know when it is just about okay to use them. I analyse data from first principles, but know when it is acceptable to “stir the pile”. I understand that stock prices are not lognormal, but used to know when to simply apply the Black Scholes formula.

Basically, the ability to know when to break rules is distributed similarly to how I learn - stuff that I have a strong intuition and interest for, I know how to break the rules there. Where I struggle to learn, I also struggle to break the rules.

Putting it another way, how much you know about a particular domain might be approximated by how good you are at breaking the rules in that domain.

Jobs contain multitudes

Ok I’m using an Amit Varma-ism here, but I guess, having appeared on The Seen And The Unseen half a dozen times (back then, each episode was about half an hour long, so this was doable), I’m entitled to do so.

In any case, one feature of most corporate jobs is that they require one to simultaneously hold several different skills in order to do well. Now, if you have ADHD, which means you are very good at a few things and very bad at everything else, this can go one of two ways.

If you luck out, the set of skills that your job demands is a subset of the set of skills you are good at. In this case, you will do fantastically well in your job.

In most cases, though, while the core parts of your job intersect with the skills you are really good at (else it’s unlikely you’d be taking that job), there will be plenty of other things that the job demands which fall under the “things I suck at” bucket. And soon you will find that irrespective of how good you are in your “core skills”, that you are really bad at these auxiliary skills means overall you end up doing a poor job.

I’m reminded of a recent job where I had structured my role (at the time of joining) such that most of what was required was things I was really good at. Initially I think I did pretty well. I got ambitious, and my responsibilities increased. And now suddenly I found myself doing a lot of the kind of the work that I was no good at. I quickly got stressed (which made everything worse), stopped enjoying the job, and a few months later, started planning my exit (not that I planned particularly well, but this is for another day).

In fact, now that I think about it, this was one of the motivations for me to set up my own consulting practice in 2011 - in all the jobs I had done until then, I had been sort of forced to do stuff I was no good at, and I had felt that my only way out of that was to be a consultant - so that, that way I could be picky about the work I’d get, and only take on stuff I was really good at. That was good while it lasted (and then domain-creep happened!).

Entrepreneurship

Now that I’m running my own company, I guess the success depends upon my ability to be able to outsource everything that I’m not very good at. Luckily, I’ve found a cofounder who covers most of the bases (things I suck at), but a few small gaps remain.

That said, from what I understand, running a company means also handling all sorts of odds and ends that are hard to define and outsource. Let’s see how I manage that!