> I don't think there's any task in which someone with ADHD is more suited to than someone without; there are tasks which are less difficult for the person with ADHD than other tasks, but ADHD doesn't bestow many, if any, advantages over a neurotypical person.
Your experience is totally valid! I can only speak for my own experience, but I find compared to my neurotypical peers, I am much more capable at learning a breadth of topics. My peers are significantly better at performing 40 three-way matches for invoices in a work day while I would totally fail at that. But let me make my own video game where I have to learn how to program it, design art, and create music, and I’m great at that! My power comes from the ability to bounce around things depending on what I want to focus on that day. I create an environment for myself where I have dozens of tasks I can do, so that I always have something that will grab my interest.
The way this usually plays out in the actual working world is that I struggle with boring, repetitive tasks, but now that my boss knows how I work, he has let me set a more friendly set up and now frequently sees me deliver major changes that would have taken another developer weeks to accomplish given the diversity of tasks I have solved. Meanwhile the other developer is delivering on certain types of tasks I would be much worse at accomplishing. Our team plays to our strengths.
I’m great at deeply learning various concepts then hyperfocusing and delivering significant code changes at work. Some days I’ll complete 3 major jira tickets complete with testing because I’m so focused. Now of course there are other days where it’s much harder to get things done. But setting up that environment where I have diverse things to work on lets that aspect of my ADHD shine.
I will note that I’m properly medicated and have a great diet that helped a lot. School was always really tough for me. Then I discovered when I was studying for the CPA exam, that I learn much better from books than from a teacher in a classroom. I experienced this again when I self-taught CS. These days, I view my ADHD as less of a hindrance and more of a different approach. It’s true that it has downsides compared to a neurotypical, but I feel that it absolutely has its upsides as well when in a healthy state.