Re:Hasn't really been a problem
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've tried ritalin on and off, and it sorta does help, but I can never remember to take the damn thing, and I dislike the side effects - particularly that it affects my creativity. Taking a pill which squashes your creativity _sucks_.
I had the same problem on Adderall (spelling?). It worked wonders for my career. I used it for about a year and got promotions and bonuses and was a hero at the office...BUT, I ended up with zero creativity. I was no fun to be around. I didn't even want to be a consumer of creativity (stopped reading novels, watching movies, playing games, etc). I was also sleeping about 2-3 hours a night and constantly going full bore. I was burning myself out something fierce.
Finally my girlfriend of 6 years intervened. She talked to someone at the office, the office forced me to take a week's vacation, the gf convinced me to lay off the Adderall for that week, and it was like I woke up from a nightmare. I had no idea who I'd been for the past year.
So now I take nothing, but I'm in danger of being axed from the job as I can't seem to get anything done. I fritter around and procrastinate and make lists and have really good intentions, but never actually work. Which in turn makes me depressed and down on myself.
I wish I could find someplace in the middle of those two extremes, y'know?
At the risk of sounding antagonistic, the feelings expressed in that message confirm what the previous poster mentioned.
The 40something year old woman very possibly does have better people skills than a 21 year old prodigy. The 21 year old probably has never been on the other end of the phone, stuck on a tech problem, freaking out because if he doesn't make deadline he won't get his quarterly bonus and he needs it to make the mortgage payment, let alone buy his kid that new laptop he needs to become a prodigy...
Her tech skills may be lacking, but a decent help desk has a knowledge base she can draw on, or a more experienced older tech she can pull in.
Your admin in an 'institution large enough to have a dedicated tech support team' doesn't work alone. People skills extend beyond just the customer. There's employee morale to consider. Efficiency.
There's a heck of a lot more to a valuable employee than skills. In fact, skills can be learned fairly quickly assuming a modicum of intelligence and interest. Being part of a team is a lot harder to teach.
Now, none of the above precludes the younger employee, but a lot of young people (probably not the ones reading/.) aren't as responsible as they should be. Manage a few high-maintanence 20 year olds that blow off work to go to a concert without prior warning, or what have you, and you'll quickly develop a lot of caution when it comes to younger applicants or employees. That isn't fair (everyone should be judged on their own merits,of course) but its the way things can be.
(FWIW, I'm a 40 year old development manager for a small company.)
So far, only one -- Power Stone -- has gotten glowing reviews; Sega needs a hit to drive the machine, a Mario Brothers or Zelda or Pokemon, all games that spurred sales of their resident hardware.
Both Soul Calibur and NFL 2000 have gotten glowing reviews, and in fact, Power Stone has gotten only 'good' reviews. In fact, for a lot of sports fans, NFL 2K has proven to be a system seller. (This all based on anecdotal evidence, but I'm a hardcore gamer and spend a lot of time in game related forums and such.) Not that this is a critical error, but when I pick up on one error I start to wonder who many others exist that I'm not seeing.
OK, first let me say I'm one of those "clueless newbies" you all seem to hate so much. Sorry, I'm not going away (though I will be evolving...stay tuned).
I thought, (and perhaps I was wrong) that one of the common Linux-developer/user sentiments was a dislike of MSoft's stranglehold on the personal computing world.
But here I'm reading that you really don't want linux to grow and possibly offer i386 owners a viable alternative to Windows.
I'm really getting mixed signals here. Can anyone clarify?
BTW, if Windows users ARE going to flock to linux, you could do a LOT worse than have the invasion led by the gamers. We gamers tend to know a lot more about the innards of our systems than the average user (not more than you developers! I'm not saying that). If you'd ever done any significant DOS/Windows gaming, you'd know that. Half the games that come out now have a patch available within days of release, and we're always messing with drivers for our soundcards and graphics cards, tweaking ini files or the registry, and so on. Yeah, these are trivial tasks to you (and to us) but they're WAY BEYOND the average non-gamer computer users. Y'know, the ones who can't figure out how to download a file, let alone decompress it.
And I don't think you have to worry about this latter group coming to linux any time soon. They cling to the tried and true.
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I've tried ritalin on and off, and it sorta does help, but I can never remember to take the damn thing, and I dislike the side effects - particularly that it affects my creativity. Taking a pill which squashes your creativity _sucks_.
I had the same problem on Adderall (spelling?). It worked wonders for my career. I used it for about a year and got promotions and bonuses and was a hero at the office...BUT, I ended up with zero creativity. I was no fun to be around. I didn't even want to be a consumer of creativity (stopped reading novels, watching movies, playing games, etc). I was also sleeping about 2-3 hours a night and constantly going full bore. I was burning myself out something fierce.
Finally my girlfriend of 6 years intervened. She talked to someone at the office, the office forced me to take a week's vacation, the gf convinced me to lay off the Adderall for that week, and it was like I woke up from a nightmare. I had no idea who I'd been for the past year.
So now I take nothing, but I'm in danger of being axed from the job as I can't seem to get anything done. I fritter around and procrastinate and make lists and have really good intentions, but never actually work. Which in turn makes me depressed and down on myself.
I wish I could find someplace in the middle of those two extremes, y'know?
At the risk of sounding antagonistic, the feelings expressed in that message confirm what the previous poster mentioned. The 40something year old woman very possibly does have better people skills than a 21 year old prodigy. The 21 year old probably has never been on the other end of the phone, stuck on a tech problem, freaking out because if he doesn't make deadline he won't get his quarterly bonus and he needs it to make the mortgage payment, let alone buy his kid that new laptop he needs to become a prodigy... Her tech skills may be lacking, but a decent help desk has a knowledge base she can draw on, or a more experienced older tech she can pull in. Your admin in an 'institution large enough to have a dedicated tech support team' doesn't work alone. People skills extend beyond just the customer. There's employee morale to consider. Efficiency. There's a heck of a lot more to a valuable employee than skills. In fact, skills can be learned fairly quickly assuming a modicum of intelligence and interest. Being part of a team is a lot harder to teach. Now, none of the above precludes the younger employee, but a lot of young people (probably not the ones reading /.) aren't as responsible as they should be. Manage a few high-maintanence 20 year olds that blow off work to go to a concert without prior warning, or what have you, and you'll quickly develop a lot of caution when it comes to younger applicants or employees. That isn't fair (everyone should be judged on their own merits,of course) but its the way things can be.
(FWIW, I'm a 40 year old development manager for a small company.)
Heh, touche. BTW, I've heard they've edited that article on the fly. Changed the bit I highlighted.
OK, first let me say I'm one of those "clueless newbies" you all seem to hate so much. Sorry, I'm not going away (though I will be evolving...stay tuned).
I thought, (and perhaps I was wrong) that one of the common Linux-developer/user sentiments was a dislike of MSoft's stranglehold on the personal computing world.
But here I'm reading that you really don't want linux to grow and possibly offer i386 owners a viable alternative to Windows.
I'm really getting mixed signals here. Can anyone clarify?
BTW, if Windows users ARE going to flock to linux, you could do a LOT worse than have the invasion led by the gamers. We gamers tend to know a lot more about the innards of our systems than the average user (not more than you developers! I'm not saying that). If you'd ever done any significant DOS/Windows gaming, you'd know that. Half the games that come out now have a patch available within days of release, and we're always messing with drivers for our soundcards and graphics cards, tweaking ini files or the registry, and so on. Yeah, these are trivial tasks to you (and to us) but they're WAY BEYOND the average non-gamer computer users. Y'know, the ones who can't figure out how to download a file, let alone decompress it.
And I don't think you have to worry about this latter group coming to linux any time soon. They cling to the tried and true.