Biomed might be a bit more ADHD for some, but it hits all the tropes.
I don’t know what I’m going to repair day to day, I’ll get all sorts of weird stuff. And sometimes get interrupted which irritates me when I’m in the middle of a big project.
But my time clock is regular daily. I go in, I triage what I can repair vs send out, what is needed immediately vs being put on the “When I get slow period” and figure out how to put in PMs. And what that really looks like is if there’s no emergency repairs, I ask my self what am I feeling that day. Do I want boring and repetitive? Lets go PM some machines. Do I want a bit of thinking, lets repair something I’ve repaired dozens to hundreds of, the troubleshooting is the thinking time. Do I want something novel, time to dig up some manuals and find something I’ve never worked on before.
Been designing orthopedic medical devices for 15 years. This is accurate in my experience as well, but I very intentionally seek out roles that have varied opportunities.
It’s why I’m working in house. I could have worked for a manufacturer but then I would have only worked on two machines and probably have lost my mind by now.
Hence programming being popular with AuDhd folks
And kitchen work.
Lots of routines, rules and systems. But you’ll never do the same day twice.
Plus everyone else loves drugs as much as you do.
I work as a camera operator (among other AV/broadcast related things), and find that shooting sports satisfies the ADHD nicely. 15 periods of hockey flies by - it’s the breaks where I realize I’m tied by period 9.
Man, I had a sweet spot job before i moved. I was effectively a gofer, just doing whatever the management wanted me to do. They understood the limits of my abilities and drip fed me with responsibilities and raises. I worked at my own pace and usually alone. Some times i was at my desk for hours doing paper work or researching. Other times i was running around all over the place to pick up supplies, or rescue coworkers with supply drops, or help with a broken vehicle, or just help ith the work on site.
It seemed like there was always something new to tackle, but everything felt doable. And also i got to listen to podcasts/music pretty much whenever i wanted.
I thought I had cracked it. I’m an engineer (not software). The job requires all of this, but the timescales are all wrong, so you’ll be designing something for six weeks, then drafting documents for the next eight. So I spend the first week in joyous flow and then the next 5 in hell. There is no job that’s right for me. I’m really useful I swear, I promise.
I run a small window cleaning company, no high rise.
It hits the spot. Jobs are on rotation, consistent, predictable. Work is adaptable, requires active problem solving, easy to notice what’s finished and what needs detailing.
I did customer service for 14 years, and I thought I hated working. Turns out I just hate stupid people and wasted effort.
I’ll work hard, if it makes sense.
ahh, that’s beautiful. Gives me hope
I found out by luck, and I’ve been much happier ever since.
For me, that has been dispatch for a towing company.
Firefighter.
I think I’m finding these communities just aren’t for me because 99% of the memes describe absolutely utterly normal wants & needs. Every single NT person on earth would want those things.
I mean… autistic people would just want the structure and adhd people would (mainly) just want the variety.
So that’s two groups in opposition.
😬
Cabinet drafting or anything in the millwork industry. Store fixtures if you want something more rigid but in-depth
No problem is ever more complicated that “which part bumps into which and how” - or like, “where can this actually fit”
Okay but wheres the stimulating part? Finding solutions to complicated questions on the first draft, ideally
The first draft is mostly interpreting the architects’/customer’s drawings to make the outside look like what they want and then the second draft (or third, usually)
In the commercial side of things you’re often working on reception desks and wall panel features (moss/water walls, logos on slats, etc.). In residential you run into lots of weird hardware and difficult cabinet arrangements for customers, and tieing in with existing stuff in a house which is always a pain.
In total, it’s a lot of managing figuring out the best way to do something out of the 6 available, or tackling some weird aspect or material you haven’t used before. I find it similar to minecraft redstone or legos in feel for how it is to do millwork engineering
I was a custom picture framer, that fit the bill if anyone’s looking for recs
Where are you based? Are you hiring? And what’s the income?
I traveled a lot, there were shops in NOLA, Iowa, and Houston I went back and forth between. The reps for the products knew me and could recommend me to the shops in whatever area I wanted to go. It was great there for awhile. I’ve been fully disabled since 2010 though, and at that point I was a manager, but still only made $10/hr. The cost of owning a frameshop and supplies makes it pretty hard to pay employees what they’re worth, regardless of how the owners feel about you as an employee. If you want to get started in the industry though, I would ask around different shops and see who has time to train you. I ended up liking to work for The Great Frame Up brand bc their miter saw is German and much less likely to chop limbs off than the chop saw a lot of private owners use. One of my former bosses almost lost her arm that way.
This is why I’m stuck as a line cook 🙃
Most people I know that work in restaurants could be on the spectrum or have ADHD. You get really good at doing a lot of small different things and you have to remember about 5 things at a time. I opened my own restaurant last year to add both extra boringness (paperwork) and extra scaryness!
It’s software development. You get your stupid little Jira tickets like little quests and you get to solve them however you see fit. And then they get put on the deployment belt and run through all the checking steps in a satisfyingly rigid way. And then you’re done with them and you don’t have to think about them ever again. It’s the perfect cycle.
Your mentioning of Jira alone gives me the shivers. For some project I had to use it, and it sends you like a hundred emails a week.
That’s easy, just filter them away in a separate folder and never look at them
Yeah I know, but why do I have to jump through a hoop to get a normal user experience?
It’s atlassian software 😅
You cannot imagine how much must go correctly to end up in such a blessed state. And if the stars do align, enjoy every single one of those ephemeral minutes because inevitably, the PM leaves, there is a re-org, and the PM replacement who never touched jira before and has never delivered software is steering the team one week at a time without spending any time putting in the work to make jira smooth. I hate jira. It is a real skill (read: tolerance for bullshit) to arrange shit so that work is well organized. And it is massively missed when absent.
You get a JIRA Ticket
“Customer says X doesn’t work”
Try to reproduce the issue
It clearly works
Get to find edge cases and do 10 roundtrips with customerMany such cases
Or, JIRA ticket: complete the entire 18 month project
Honestly I don’t mind this one that much. IFF it is well designed, the entire team is in the loop of what’s to be done, and you don’t get immediate unrealistic time pressure.
I’ve always preferred working on JIRA tickets that were meatier than having to work on 15 different tickets in one day. The context switch just eats a bit too much energy for me every time.
It’s perfect when you know the application inside and out. A completely different story when you get dropped into a project that uses sixteen frameworks and libraries, including widely employed features that are barely documented. You get to do guesswork on whether this pattern is recognised by that library, while your system is constantly swapping under the weight of dozens of browser tabs with the docs and StackOverflows.
I wish it was like this. But instead were getting tickets with barely a title. Or there’s a report that the application misbehaves ones or twice per month with no reproduction steps, fix it. Or the delivery schedule is set, but there are no feature roadmap or milestones to track what is yet to be done and if we are on track. Or the project manager has got their position because they sucked at coding and the company couldn’t figure out what else to do with them and you have to keep explaining basic technical decisions over and over to them. And everything will come back haunting you as long as you are in the company. One ticket keeps being resurrected for you because client keeps changing their mind on how it should work or keeps finding more esoteric edge cases. Or you’re roped in to some legacy project over and over again, because you managed to do a minor fix for it two years ago and you’re the only one left who has ever touched it.
I’m a manager with an engineering background, and this is exactly what good managers should solve for you. I love Jira but I know it sucks to configure correctly. Your problems are not because of Jira, but managers fucking up the process. But more than Jira (love it or hate it), this is about organization: People don’t know how to do their jobs correctly, decisions not being made by the right people or the right time (or not at all), too much planning and not enough execution or vice versa, people not empowered to say no, all that stuff. Everybody always hates on management but it’s a thankless and tough job to keep the whole operation running smoothly. It’s like that old IT joke “everything is working already, what do I pay you for? vs nothing is working, what do I pay you for?”
The curse of competence
So, it’s an adventurer’s life from your typical isekai. I see. Makes sense now. Only that the things asked are never clear, change midway, the finish conditions keep being altered, the validation at the end keeps being enforced differently or that 3 weeks later someone will ask about the thing done and you have zero memories of that place. Or that because you did it one time now it will always be pushed onto you, even when you don’t want it anymore. All of this while slowly killing you on the inside. Yep. Perfect.
Commercial pest control has been suiting me well. Repetitive enough that I always know what to do, different enough to keep me engaged and entertained. Pay is pretty good. There are definitely some shitty accounts that I service but there are enough easy or fulfilling ones to round that out.
Teaching meets all of these criteria. The one it doesn’t meet is “make enough money to survive”
It’s shameful how the US treats its teachers.
It’s shameful that teachers are treated wildly differently based on zip code.
Yeah I’m AuDHD myself, got the diagnosis in my late thirties after finally seeking help after burning out at my seventh engineering office job. Stimulant medication has helped a lot with the ADHD side of things, but I’m just done with office jobs at this point. It’s possible things might work better with another one, this time with proper medication and support. But I’m just done. I’ve spent so much time and lived through so much misery trying to be productive in engineering office roles that I have some degree of PTSD about the prospect now. At this last job, even though I didn’t know what was happening, my subconscious sure did. I quit in a panic after three days and had to be convinced to come back. I gave it another shot and made it nine months before total burnout.
I need a new career path. And I needed to try something different. And I think teaching is it. Prior to this year I have some experience teaching undergraduate students and doing a lot of K12 tutoring, but my K12 classroom experience was limited. To explore this path, I got my substitute teacher’s license over the summer. This year I’m substituting basically every day, and honestly I’m having a blast.
It works with my brain in a way almost nothing else does. Mine is more the inattentive form of ADHD than the hyperactive form. I really struggle with executive function and focus when working on long repetitive tasks, especially those with no immediate value. I’ve studied engineering extensively, up to the doctoral level. I love it as a subject. I love teaching it. I love learning it. I love applying it in hands on ways. But stick me in a cubicle and ask me to grind out calculations all day, day after day? I break. By the time I reach burnout on the job I’m basically catatonic, staring blindly at a screen or wall, disassociating the whole day away. That’s what office jobs are like for me. Hell. And I say office job, but the actual setting is irrelevant. I’ve tried work from office, work from home, and hybrid. It’s the work itself that is the problem, not the environment.
But teaching? Substitute teaching is hard. There are days that I leave frustrated, as some classes you just can’t ever get any traction on. There are some classes I’ve taught that no matter what techniques I use, I simply cannot get them quiet enough to teach. There are days when the kids really get to you, and you wonder how some of these kids are going to possibly survive in the real world without just immediately ending up in jail the instant school isn’t covering for them.
And yet, I wouldn’t trade my worst day substituting for my best office day. (At least any office day past the first few months, when I’m usually able to maintain focus when things are new and the learning curve is still steep.) Teaching just works so well for my neurology. The regular schedule. The defined work and work hours. The immediate feedback and sense of purpose in your work. It’s everything working as an engineer in a design office isn’t.
Yes, the money sucks. If I substituted every single school day of the year (not really practical), I would make 40% of what I made doing engineering work. If I go enroll in a program, get a formal teaching certificate, and become a proper teacher? 60%. But honestly, I don’t even mind. It’s not like the engineering salary is really a sustainable thing to begin with. Thankfully I at least have a spouse that is able to make the engineering life work, so we’re fine no matter what. But it would be really hard to make ends meet doing what I am now if it were just me.
Teaching is such a joy.
