Question - I've managed (bottom-up, servant-leadership, small smart teams) a few very very smart people who may or not have had ADHD, or been partially on a spectrum or ... I truly appreciated the awesome work and have been open and honest and dealt with all sorts of emotional issues and variable progress on simple tasks and diving down rat-holes etc and seen some amazing overall results and had some great co-workers. The area I really struggle with is when people get temporarily obsessed with a topic that is so far removed from the project and its goals, that I can't cover them e.g. they want to completely redevelop an established, adjacent area of expertise (new to them) from scratch. Any advice on how to have this dialog up-front e.g. we have a software project and I'll back you a long way on these areas A B C for good exploratory work, but designing a new compiler or doing a full org redesign or building custom hardware is not something I can back you on so can we agree that at the outset and just trust me, or let's agree a protocol for how to deal with these situations?
I've found myself, really wanting to reengineer code and have been fired from projects as I mostly freelance...
It's sort of a two way street... Knowing the expectations, convincing us that the bear minimum is all that's needed.
Just fix the bugs. Keep your head down. Don't rewrite 2k lines of code that's ugly and not broken...
Then I think positive two way communication is good... As the op said we suffer from fear of rejection bad also as a given imposter syndrome so if I get good feedback, I know I'm doing what you want, that you're happy... Etc.
I think part of wanting to reengineer may be wanting to convince the boss in the scenario or ourselves that we aren't just faking it and adding 20 hours to a budgeted 5 hours ends up having the reverse effect.
Tldr: good conversation, praise where due to reinforce good work and constructive criticism when something needs to change.
I was a lot worse in this respect as a junior dev... So that may also be a factor, the more ppl I work with the better I am.
I have ADHD and could be slightly ASD or just overlapping on symptoms which is common. Wasn't diagnosed till 3 years ago, medicine and exercise changed my life.
