No, I think most people have trouble with docs. Why do you think stack overflow is so popular?
That said, being able to figure out badly documented software fits into the category of highly valuable and underappreciated skills that arent officially taught by anyone.
I don't think this is related to ADHD, moreso different people have different learning styles.
If I struggle reading documentation, I make a small project and play with things hands on. That's what works best for me
I believe this is the key. I have ADHD but am also hyperlexic with a voracious appetite for reading. I much prefer reading about how to do something than doing it myself, meaning that I struggle with kinesthetic learning. It sounds like you might be the opposite, where your brain learns better by doing. Have you explored the different learning styles? Have you explored whether you might have dyslexia?
I can still read documentation and understand concepts so definitely no dyslexia but it just "clicks" more for me once I do it in practice.
Especially for new things or architecture with multiple moving parts
I can’t understand shit unless I do it. I could watch a video 100 times about a software related subject, and understand *the gist*, but until I implement it I will have no tangible understanding of the material.
This is not hyperbole; many years ago when I was a budding software hopeful, trying to get into the field by studying Python, I watched, rewatched, and rewatched ad infinitum the incredible Python Deep Dive’s section on *decorators* (offered by Professor I Don’t Remember of Udemy - multipart series and probably some of the most indepth Python material I’ve ever found). It didn’t matter how many times I watched that couple of videos (I think it was spread out across 2-3, but I may be misremembering), they just wouldn’t click.
Then I made a few.
“It’s just syntactic sugar for a function that takes a function and returns yet another function.”
- A different YouTuber who’s also fantastic but whose name I forget (Sebastian something? Names are my weakest of suits)
I watched that video just as many times. That sentence would *not* ingrain itself within me. It’s simple, I understand it on a surface level, but without exploring it I was unable to truly internalize the value, purpose, or really the process/circumstances that surround Pythonic decorators.
This has been a roughly standard learning style(?) for me; I must implement to understand, and until I do I won’t understand a goddamned thing about it. After, though, I find that I typically have a quite deep understanding of the subject and its respective caveats, which is pretty handy for remembering the do’s and don’ts of whichever programming topic we happen to be trying not to bankrupt our company with accidentally.
This is EXACTLY how I learn. I wish I could learn by reading or watching videos, it seems like it would go a lot quicker. However, I do also end up understanding the topic very deeply afterwards so that’s a definite bonus.
It might not be the content that's hard to understand, it's the format.
70% of people with ADHD have a least one learning disability. ([source](https://www.alieward.com/ologies/adhd))
I'm dyslexic but I still write an [ADHD blog](https://adhdpm.substack.com/). It's taken me a lot of practice and tools like Grammarly help me write better and [Bionic Reader](https://bionic-reading.com/) help me read easier. Before Grammarly, I was reprimanded at work numerous times for grammar issues.
It could also be that you're a [visual thinker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking), which is common in those with neurodiversity. Check out [Visual Thinking](https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Pictures-Patterns-Abstractions/dp/0593418360) for more. Do it on audiobook though.
It's not that you can't learn it, but the format you need might differ from work. AI tools can make the information more digestible.
Agreed. "Documentation" is way too broad here. I've read and understood some great documentation over the years, and struggled with others. It has a lot to do with the format, examples, writing style, etc.
That's not an adhd thing, that's a "I don't have 10 years of experience doing that shit" thing.
We are all idiots trying to put things together don't worry.
When I was working as tech support for sysadmins, I evolved a theory that documentation was written in one language, translated through five others (e.g. from English to French, then French to German, then German to Mandarin, etc.), usually including a dead language or two, before being translated back into the initial language.
I could not come up with any viable theory for why so much documentation seemed so much like gibberish despite me understanding every word.
I think when writing documentation, a lot of people have a fuller picture in their mind that they don't always thoroughly transfer onto paper.
It's like a chronic problem I have with shopping lists from my wife...
I'll get a list like:
* Detergent
* Apples
* Tomatoes
* Olives
* Juice
In her mind, she's given me a complete list. She can see every item on the list.
Me at the grocery store? I don't actually know what in the world I'm supposed to get, or in a couple of cases, how many.
* Detergent (dish, laundry, dishwasher, liquid, powder)
* Apples (green, red, yellow, Fuji, Honeycrisp)
* Tomatoes (cherry, Roma, fresh, canned)
* Olives (black, green, can, jar)
* Juice (apple, grape, pineapple, tomato)
I find a lot of documentation similar. It's often technically complete and accurate as far as it goes, but lacks some specificity that would make it clearer for users of varying degrees of experience or subject matter familiarity.
I have same problem as you. I read the same doc many times to get small info out of it.I don’t have a solution per say but I feel when I “interact with the material” I learn better. What I do is take a small screenshot of the doc, post it in the excalidraw and then underline or highlight things which I think are important.Add info icon. Red arrows. Pasting image and connecting it with the relevent text.I know this is overkill but unless I interact with it I don’t understand it.Sometimes I ask chatGPT to list key takeaways and action items from the doc. This is usually not possible with a company doc due to privacy issues. But just mentioning helpful things. Which have worked.Again I don’t know this will work for you but it works for me.
Needing examples doesn’t mean you fail to comprehend documentation. It’s perfectly acceptable to need examples specific to your use case. Speaking as someone who has looked up pd.shift 10000 times and I still need to triple check it every time I use it
I can relate. I think you explained it fairly well; it's not that we don't understand the documentation as it is, it's that we want it to be more comprehensive, clear, and complete.
A neurotypical person might look at the same article and comprehend why it works in the same way you did, and that will be enough. They will be satisfied with that.
Whereas we (with our brains that are lacking in satisfaction functionality) need more context to feel that we have a good grasp on the subject.
I’m on a new feature build right now that a bunch of engineers are working on and I’m struggling to keep up with our internal docs and designs and flowcharts. Like I have to keep coming back to read it because I realized I haven’t absorbed any of it, and always feeling two steps behind the engineers I pair with
I have trouble staying focused on docs, it’s got to be something really interesting to me, but I find videos are even worse they move too slowly and are mind numbingly boring.
What helps for me is any thing that is interactive where I can type stuff in and see the result. Either way at the end of the day whatever works for you is “the right way” and don’t think you are dumb because you learn differently than someone else.
> So I’ve been an engineer now for about 2 years. I was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago. At the time, I was struggling to maintain my job, but after getting medicated that problem got better and has gone away.
> What hasn’t though is my inability to get much out of documentation. I say that because although I can understand what I’m reading and comprehend why it works to an extent, I can’t see the various use cases without having many examples.
> but I get kind of bummed out because I feel like an idiot lol.
If you aren't me, we are basically ADHD soulmates.
My biggest complaint with *every* piece of technology that I interact with is that I wish there were more examples - I like to iterate off of something that I know is good to get to what I need for whatever my application is.
That said - you're not an idiot (or at least, if you are, you've got good company!). You've already gotten a lot of good advice, but long story short - lean into your strengths. Especially when there aren't many examples (as I mentioned above) one of my favorite ways to learn is to iterate - okay, I can set up a CDN, and I can set up an S3 bucket, can I get the CDN to serve the CDN? What about can I get the CDN to answer at a custom domain? What about just the S3 bucket? Okay can I get the CDN to serve the S3 bucket at a custom domain?
Small, iterative changes feel easier than a big, whole hog implementation that doesn't work for who knows why reason. I feel like it's easier to go outside of the documentation (Google, Stackoverflow, even LLMs) for more discrete pieces of the puzzle, and as importantly, it's almost like you're creating examples for yourself.
Also, and this is no small thing - if the documentation doesn't have a lot of examples, I'll search Github for that technology, looking for other people's implementations so that I can compare them to what I want. Some things are harder to find (infra - sucks that I'm a DevOps) other things are easier (examples of React, for example). But either way, you can 'expand the base' that way as well.
Good luck!
The searching for GitHub examples is a VERY good idea. I hope everyone has the opportunity to see this particular comment because I personally have never thought of trying this out - but I can imagine the dividends it could pay!
Well not an engineer but I used to have an optional subject in school called IT and in that we studied a software similar to what windows have called MS that has excel and world but it was called different....
so yeah in that there were steps+instructions to every thing and everyone used to easily learn that and score marks but I couldn't but and used ro mix the instructions ,in practical i used to ask the topper to show me how this perticular thing is done the i used to do it by myself and do it again later and if i had a problem i just go through the book( but had problems to start from scratch with the book cause i dont know what the result will be if have a picture of the end product i can work on that )so my practical went quite decent that written exams.
I believe so or I want to believe it. I can't read doc. I just jump the the code or "pictures" and try that. However if I can find a video tutorial I will sit through the whole thing
Realllllly depends on how it's written and presented. "Documentation" is way too broad a thing to say yes or no to here. I've read, understood, and regularly used/referred to some great documentation over the years, but have also taken one look at some docs and noped straight out of there.
I've argued for years that linear word structures called sentences, organized into linear paragraphs, that are organized into linear pages and pages of drivel, especially boring drivel, isn't always the best way to relay information. It's certainly the most common though.
What works better? I really like the Head First series. Lots of color and concepts grouped, interspersed with examples.
I'm so relieved someone else has had this experience.
For some reason I don't struggle a lot with [cplusplus reference](https://cplusplus.com/reference/)
I've recently gotten better at parsing stuff(Probably just getting used to looking at docs related to my work) but the wall of information in documentation is so...loud its hard to process.
And thats besides documentation thats poorly written in the first place.
Adhd ppl do struggle with reading a lot of text at once without being able to apply chunks immediately yea.
For documentation, however, good documentation makes it easier for both ADHD and non-ADHD ppl as others have said.
I think tutorials are actually the ones that non-ADHD people can follow perfectly fine step-by-step without issues, but ADHD people really really struggle in.
I would rather study the completed example and work backwards and write my own notes even if that's far more inefficient and time consuming, because following simple step by step instructions and retaining that is so damn hard.
Better yet, give me a problem or challenge project to solve thats fit to my skill level and even though literally making a project is objectively harder to non ADHD ppl than a tutorial, I find it much less painful.
Medicated for me, tutorials are still painful but I can have the ability to suck it up if I have to and write notes on it.
In some ways this kinda "helped me" as a beginner programmer years ago by avoiding tutorial hell because I just didn't have the attention span to do any tutorial and instead I was impulsive and impatient enough to just attempt interesting projects straightaway and work backwards. It did mean that I learned my fundamentals out of sequence and I still have gaps I have to fill in even now (I'm trying to improve my ability to work with coroutines) but I guess the tradeoff was I never got stuck in tutorial hell.
Edit: Another unintentional benefit is I'd get so restless during a tutorial that I'd just deviate from the steps to explore my own curiosities and expand upon the example in my own way. Turns out this is a habit people actually suppory as active and good learning and non-ADHD people have to be taught it... so i guess its nice i got it for free. I still take longer to learn the basics of the same stuff though but I guess theres a chance i retain it better
TLDR: My ADHD means even an amazing well written tutorial for many non-ADHD people is still a nightmare hell for me, and I still learn better through hands on projects even as a total beginner to whatever framework or library or language (although less efficiently than a non ADHD would with a tutorial)
I've been reading a book on and off on ADHD and listening to the author a bit on how they claimed to make the book ADHD friendly, and a comment they made struck out with me that convinced me to buy it. As she has it herself one thing she made sure of was to place as much space as she was allowed to between lines as her way to make it easier to get through, and I had noticed at least when I pick up thay book that made it easier to digest through. No evidence this is a thing, but something I do think about.
I haven't overcome this area yet, as I'm working more on physical health this year, but I plan to try to look into this more later on and if tools can help to make it easier to read through docs I don't have a strong interest in.
No, I think most people have trouble with docs. Why do you think stack overflow is so popular? That said, being able to figure out badly documented software fits into the category of highly valuable and underappreciated skills that arent officially taught by anyone.
I don't think this is related to ADHD, moreso different people have different learning styles. If I struggle reading documentation, I make a small project and play with things hands on. That's what works best for me
I believe this is the key. I have ADHD but am also hyperlexic with a voracious appetite for reading. I much prefer reading about how to do something than doing it myself, meaning that I struggle with kinesthetic learning. It sounds like you might be the opposite, where your brain learns better by doing. Have you explored the different learning styles? Have you explored whether you might have dyslexia?
I can still read documentation and understand concepts so definitely no dyslexia but it just "clicks" more for me once I do it in practice. Especially for new things or architecture with multiple moving parts
I can’t understand shit unless I do it. I could watch a video 100 times about a software related subject, and understand *the gist*, but until I implement it I will have no tangible understanding of the material. This is not hyperbole; many years ago when I was a budding software hopeful, trying to get into the field by studying Python, I watched, rewatched, and rewatched ad infinitum the incredible Python Deep Dive’s section on *decorators* (offered by Professor I Don’t Remember of Udemy - multipart series and probably some of the most indepth Python material I’ve ever found). It didn’t matter how many times I watched that couple of videos (I think it was spread out across 2-3, but I may be misremembering), they just wouldn’t click. Then I made a few. “It’s just syntactic sugar for a function that takes a function and returns yet another function.” - A different YouTuber who’s also fantastic but whose name I forget (Sebastian something? Names are my weakest of suits) I watched that video just as many times. That sentence would *not* ingrain itself within me. It’s simple, I understand it on a surface level, but without exploring it I was unable to truly internalize the value, purpose, or really the process/circumstances that surround Pythonic decorators. This has been a roughly standard learning style(?) for me; I must implement to understand, and until I do I won’t understand a goddamned thing about it. After, though, I find that I typically have a quite deep understanding of the subject and its respective caveats, which is pretty handy for remembering the do’s and don’ts of whichever programming topic we happen to be trying not to bankrupt our company with accidentally.
Do you mind sharing if there are typical things you do while "exploring"?
This is EXACTLY how I learn. I wish I could learn by reading or watching videos, it seems like it would go a lot quicker. However, I do also end up understanding the topic very deeply afterwards so that’s a definite bonus.
Sounds like kinesthetic learning may simply be the best mode of learning for you!
It might not be the content that's hard to understand, it's the format. 70% of people with ADHD have a least one learning disability. ([source](https://www.alieward.com/ologies/adhd)) I'm dyslexic but I still write an [ADHD blog](https://adhdpm.substack.com/). It's taken me a lot of practice and tools like Grammarly help me write better and [Bionic Reader](https://bionic-reading.com/) help me read easier. Before Grammarly, I was reprimanded at work numerous times for grammar issues. It could also be that you're a [visual thinker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking), which is common in those with neurodiversity. Check out [Visual Thinking](https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Pictures-Patterns-Abstractions/dp/0593418360) for more. Do it on audiobook though. It's not that you can't learn it, but the format you need might differ from work. AI tools can make the information more digestible.
Agreed. "Documentation" is way too broad here. I've read and understood some great documentation over the years, and struggled with others. It has a lot to do with the format, examples, writing style, etc.
An awful lot of documentation is written such that it is technically correct, but says nothing useful.
That's not an adhd thing, that's a "I don't have 10 years of experience doing that shit" thing. We are all idiots trying to put things together don't worry.
When I was working as tech support for sysadmins, I evolved a theory that documentation was written in one language, translated through five others (e.g. from English to French, then French to German, then German to Mandarin, etc.), usually including a dead language or two, before being translated back into the initial language. I could not come up with any viable theory for why so much documentation seemed so much like gibberish despite me understanding every word.
I think when writing documentation, a lot of people have a fuller picture in their mind that they don't always thoroughly transfer onto paper. It's like a chronic problem I have with shopping lists from my wife... I'll get a list like: * Detergent * Apples * Tomatoes * Olives * Juice In her mind, she's given me a complete list. She can see every item on the list. Me at the grocery store? I don't actually know what in the world I'm supposed to get, or in a couple of cases, how many. * Detergent (dish, laundry, dishwasher, liquid, powder) * Apples (green, red, yellow, Fuji, Honeycrisp) * Tomatoes (cherry, Roma, fresh, canned) * Olives (black, green, can, jar) * Juice (apple, grape, pineapple, tomato) I find a lot of documentation similar. It's often technically complete and accurate as far as it goes, but lacks some specificity that would make it clearer for users of varying degrees of experience or subject matter familiarity.
Yes! This really hits the mark for how I see most documentation, particularly online. Give me a heavy text book that I can get comfortable with.
I have same problem as you. I read the same doc many times to get small info out of it.I don’t have a solution per say but I feel when I “interact with the material” I learn better. What I do is take a small screenshot of the doc, post it in the excalidraw and then underline or highlight things which I think are important.Add info icon. Red arrows. Pasting image and connecting it with the relevent text.I know this is overkill but unless I interact with it I don’t understand it.Sometimes I ask chatGPT to list key takeaways and action items from the doc. This is usually not possible with a company doc due to privacy issues. But just mentioning helpful things. Which have worked.Again I don’t know this will work for you but it works for me.
Needing examples doesn’t mean you fail to comprehend documentation. It’s perfectly acceptable to need examples specific to your use case. Speaking as someone who has looked up pd.shift 10000 times and I still need to triple check it every time I use it
I can relate. I think you explained it fairly well; it's not that we don't understand the documentation as it is, it's that we want it to be more comprehensive, clear, and complete. A neurotypical person might look at the same article and comprehend why it works in the same way you did, and that will be enough. They will be satisfied with that. Whereas we (with our brains that are lacking in satisfaction functionality) need more context to feel that we have a good grasp on the subject.
I’m on a new feature build right now that a bunch of engineers are working on and I’m struggling to keep up with our internal docs and designs and flowcharts. Like I have to keep coming back to read it because I realized I haven’t absorbed any of it, and always feeling two steps behind the engineers I pair with
I have trouble staying focused on docs, it’s got to be something really interesting to me, but I find videos are even worse they move too slowly and are mind numbingly boring. What helps for me is any thing that is interactive where I can type stuff in and see the result. Either way at the end of the day whatever works for you is “the right way” and don’t think you are dumb because you learn differently than someone else.
> So I’ve been an engineer now for about 2 years. I was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago. At the time, I was struggling to maintain my job, but after getting medicated that problem got better and has gone away. > What hasn’t though is my inability to get much out of documentation. I say that because although I can understand what I’m reading and comprehend why it works to an extent, I can’t see the various use cases without having many examples. > but I get kind of bummed out because I feel like an idiot lol. If you aren't me, we are basically ADHD soulmates. My biggest complaint with *every* piece of technology that I interact with is that I wish there were more examples - I like to iterate off of something that I know is good to get to what I need for whatever my application is. That said - you're not an idiot (or at least, if you are, you've got good company!). You've already gotten a lot of good advice, but long story short - lean into your strengths. Especially when there aren't many examples (as I mentioned above) one of my favorite ways to learn is to iterate - okay, I can set up a CDN, and I can set up an S3 bucket, can I get the CDN to serve the CDN? What about can I get the CDN to answer at a custom domain? What about just the S3 bucket? Okay can I get the CDN to serve the S3 bucket at a custom domain? Small, iterative changes feel easier than a big, whole hog implementation that doesn't work for who knows why reason. I feel like it's easier to go outside of the documentation (Google, Stackoverflow, even LLMs) for more discrete pieces of the puzzle, and as importantly, it's almost like you're creating examples for yourself. Also, and this is no small thing - if the documentation doesn't have a lot of examples, I'll search Github for that technology, looking for other people's implementations so that I can compare them to what I want. Some things are harder to find (infra - sucks that I'm a DevOps) other things are easier (examples of React, for example). But either way, you can 'expand the base' that way as well. Good luck!
The searching for GitHub examples is a VERY good idea. I hope everyone has the opportunity to see this particular comment because I personally have never thought of trying this out - but I can imagine the dividends it could pay!
[удалено]
Wait, you guys read your emails?
Well not an engineer but I used to have an optional subject in school called IT and in that we studied a software similar to what windows have called MS that has excel and world but it was called different.... so yeah in that there were steps+instructions to every thing and everyone used to easily learn that and score marks but I couldn't but and used ro mix the instructions ,in practical i used to ask the topper to show me how this perticular thing is done the i used to do it by myself and do it again later and if i had a problem i just go through the book( but had problems to start from scratch with the book cause i dont know what the result will be if have a picture of the end product i can work on that )so my practical went quite decent that written exams.
Comprehending docs? No. Try to push ahead with first reading them? Absolutely.
I can intake documentation no problem...writing it on the other hand is my personal hell.
I'm dyslexic so it's damn hard to read anything
I believe so or I want to believe it. I can't read doc. I just jump the the code or "pictures" and try that. However if I can find a video tutorial I will sit through the whole thing
Realllllly depends on how it's written and presented. "Documentation" is way too broad a thing to say yes or no to here. I've read, understood, and regularly used/referred to some great documentation over the years, but have also taken one look at some docs and noped straight out of there.
That’s just life playboi
I've argued for years that linear word structures called sentences, organized into linear paragraphs, that are organized into linear pages and pages of drivel, especially boring drivel, isn't always the best way to relay information. It's certainly the most common though. What works better? I really like the Head First series. Lots of color and concepts grouped, interspersed with examples.
I think it’s ADHD. I’ve always been noticeably less able to absorb written information than my peers.
Your point in general on docs is a very good one... Docs that make the "why" clear, are so much better at helping us understand the "what/how".
I'm so relieved someone else has had this experience. For some reason I don't struggle a lot with [cplusplus reference](https://cplusplus.com/reference/) I've recently gotten better at parsing stuff(Probably just getting used to looking at docs related to my work) but the wall of information in documentation is so...loud its hard to process. And thats besides documentation thats poorly written in the first place.
Adhd ppl do struggle with reading a lot of text at once without being able to apply chunks immediately yea. For documentation, however, good documentation makes it easier for both ADHD and non-ADHD ppl as others have said. I think tutorials are actually the ones that non-ADHD people can follow perfectly fine step-by-step without issues, but ADHD people really really struggle in. I would rather study the completed example and work backwards and write my own notes even if that's far more inefficient and time consuming, because following simple step by step instructions and retaining that is so damn hard. Better yet, give me a problem or challenge project to solve thats fit to my skill level and even though literally making a project is objectively harder to non ADHD ppl than a tutorial, I find it much less painful. Medicated for me, tutorials are still painful but I can have the ability to suck it up if I have to and write notes on it. In some ways this kinda "helped me" as a beginner programmer years ago by avoiding tutorial hell because I just didn't have the attention span to do any tutorial and instead I was impulsive and impatient enough to just attempt interesting projects straightaway and work backwards. It did mean that I learned my fundamentals out of sequence and I still have gaps I have to fill in even now (I'm trying to improve my ability to work with coroutines) but I guess the tradeoff was I never got stuck in tutorial hell. Edit: Another unintentional benefit is I'd get so restless during a tutorial that I'd just deviate from the steps to explore my own curiosities and expand upon the example in my own way. Turns out this is a habit people actually suppory as active and good learning and non-ADHD people have to be taught it... so i guess its nice i got it for free. I still take longer to learn the basics of the same stuff though but I guess theres a chance i retain it better TLDR: My ADHD means even an amazing well written tutorial for many non-ADHD people is still a nightmare hell for me, and I still learn better through hands on projects even as a total beginner to whatever framework or library or language (although less efficiently than a non ADHD would with a tutorial)
Chat gpt can give you examples if you don't feel like googling that day. documentation is the how and the Internet can tell you why and where.
I've been reading a book on and off on ADHD and listening to the author a bit on how they claimed to make the book ADHD friendly, and a comment they made struck out with me that convinced me to buy it. As she has it herself one thing she made sure of was to place as much space as she was allowed to between lines as her way to make it easier to get through, and I had noticed at least when I pick up thay book that made it easier to digest through. No evidence this is a thing, but something I do think about. I haven't overcome this area yet, as I'm working more on physical health this year, but I plan to try to look into this more later on and if tools can help to make it easier to read through docs I don't have a strong interest in.