I'm not apologising for being productive

By the time a child with ADHD reaches the age of ten, they’ve received an estimated 20,000 more corrective or negative messages than their neurotypical peers. Not a little more. Twenty. Thousand. More.

That’s before secondary school. That’s before a single performance review. That’s a childhood of being told to sit still, pay attention, slow down, think before you speak, by people who fundamentally could not keep up with how your brain moves.

And it compounds. Adults with ADHD are significantly more likely to struggle with addiction, to have been incarcerated, to have experienced abuse, to have cycled through unemployment in ways that get read as instability rather than what it actually is: a brain that was never given the right environment. The statistics are grim and they’re real and they represent people, not data points.

We spent our entire developmental years being corrected into shapes that didn’t fit us, by systems that weren’t built for us. I’ve written before about how contribution guides can be a form of gatekeeping. The same energy that makes a ten-year-old feel like a problem makes an adult developer feel like their pull request is an imposition. The mechanism is the same. The message is the same. Sit down. Slow down. Do it our way.

And somehow, through all of that, the overcorrection, the self-doubt, the statistical likelihood of things going badly, some of us are still here. Still building. Still shipping.

I am one of those people, and done performing gratitude for it.

I’ve got nearly twenty years in this industry (that is to say, Tech). Grunt to exec to grunt, by choice, both times.

In the UK, free from the cultural friction that sometimes flattens people who work differently, my ability to move fast and break things genuinely worked in my favour early on. I went from junior to lead to manager to exec faster than most people expected, including me. And I was shit at some of it. Management is a craft and I learned it the hard way, mostly by caring too much and drawing the wrong people toward that openness.

But I also built something in those years. I have former reports who still tell me I was the best manager they ever had. That means something to me. Not because I need the validation, but because it tells me that my instinct, to support people properly, to trust them, to not manage by fear, was right, even when it got abused by people who mistook generosity for weakness.

I stepped off the upward career train twice. Once to commute less. Once when my kids were born. Both times people looked at me like I’d lost the plot. I hadn’t. I just didn’t need the title as badly as I needed to be present.

Before any of this AI conversation existed, before Claude, before any of it, my work spoke for itself. I shipped architecture that improved live aggregate search performance by a factor of ten. I placed the first independent hotel search aggregator on TripAdvisor’s self-service integration, something that had been reserved exclusively for major chains before that point. I’ve blazed trails in places that didn’t have maps yet. None of that needed an apology. None of it needed to be slower or quieter to be valid.

Here in 2026, the mismatch between how my brain works and what my tooling could handle is finally closing. AI caught up with my brain.

I should say: I’m usually slow to adopt new tools. Not out of stubbornness, but because finding something that fits without disrupting the fragile zen of a working system is genuinely scary when your brain already has a complicated relationship with consistency. I don’t pick up new tools for fun. I pick them up when they solve a real problem. Claude solved a real problem for me!

I run six to twelve windows concurrently. I use directive prompting, not conversational back-and-forth, but precise, structured instruction that tells the model exactly what to do and what not to do. It turns out that nearly twenty years of knowing how to break down a problem, communicate a spec, and define a constraint makes you very good at this. The model is fast. I am precise. Together we are unreasonable.

My Asana is up to date. My Notion pages are coherent. GitHub is my living, breathing buffer of ideas, changes, and context that my peers can ingest at their own pace, a healthy back-pressure system instead of a firehose with no valve.

And yes, Claude is a big part of that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of performance I’m done with. I’ve written before about Slack being social infrastructure for remote teams. The tools we choose shape how we work and who gets to thrive in that work. AI is no different. It’s a tool. So is a compiler. So is a linter. So is Stack Overflow. I’ve never met anyone who apologised for using a faster computer.

What I’m less patient for is the implication, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, that the output is the problem. That moving fast is inconsiderate. That contributing to things outside your designated lane is presumptuous. That you should slow yourself down out of deference to people who haven’t kept up with you yet.

I’ve watched entire teams pull back from collaboration, from celebration, from basic professional socialisation, not because of anything I did wrong, but because of prejudice toward the way I work. Because I move differently. Because I produce more. Because my enthusiasm reads as aggression to people who’ve decided, before I’ve opened my mouth, that I’m too much. That’s not feedback, it’s kinda punishment for being different.

I’m a little more conscious than I used to be of how I show up with other teams, and it’s something I’m still working on. But there’s a line between “be thoughtful” and “make yourself smaller so nobody feels sad.” I’ve had more successes by being productive than I have being accommodating (sorry).

So here’s what I’d say to anyone, ADHDer or not, who recognises this pattern.

Follow the guidelines teams put in place (assuming you remember they exist). That’s just polite. If there’s a process, use it. If there’s a convention, respect it. Not because you owe anyone your compliance, but because operating within reasonable structure is how you stay in the game long enough to actually change things.

Don’t stop building.

Don’t meet their negative energy. Don’t rise to it. Stay collaborative, stay open, keep your PRs coming. The current noise about AI-generated code flooding open source and putting pressure on contributors and infrastructure? Total. Bullshit. You have to adapt, because that’s what engineers do. Not every variable needs a perfect name. Not every file needs to pass a linter on the first commit. If the code works, the tests pass, and you’re not breaking contracts or signatures, you’re good. Ship it.

And if you’re running into microcosms of that same open source whining – the gatekeeping, the looking-down on AI-generated code, the passive resistance, the social withdrawal dressed up as professional concern – They are welcome to it. Keep contributing. Don’t stop building. Don’t let people’s feelings stop you from doing your job. Don’t let the overcorrection win. You’re allowed to be this good at this.

FAQ

Why do people with ADHD receive so much negative feedback?

Children with ADHD often receive significantly more corrective or negative messages than their neurotypical peers (an estimated 20,000 more by age 10) because their natural behaviors—moving fast, acting impulsively, or struggling to maintain focus on uninteresting tasks—clash with environments built for neurotypical expectations. This compounds over time, leading to higher rates of self-doubt and systemic challenges in adulthood.

How does ADHD impact career progression?

ADHD can be a double-edged sword. The ability to hyperfocus, move fast, and connect disparate ideas can drive rapid career advancement and exceptional output. However, the same traits can lead to friction in environments that prioritize rigid processes, “professional” communication styles, and slow consensus-building over actual results.

Why might someone step off the management track?

Career progression isn’t strictly linear. Many professionals, including those who are neurodivergent, choose to step away from management or executive roles to prioritize their personal lives, family, or to return to individual contributor roles where they can focus on building and shipping rather than administration and politics.