The last task I got from my boss had a Jira ticket headed with “THIS CODE IS BAD. FIX IT BUT DO NOT REFACTOR IT”.

Yeah, I have a reputation.

But it would be better if my coworkers didn’t write garbage.

Dev with 18-20 years of experience. I was originally diagnosed in the 90s. Stopped taking meds (Atomoxetine) recently because I hated how they altered my mood.

It’s not just you. Your colleagues probably have the same struggle but it just hasn’t been talked about yet. Any time I’ve brought up a gripe about something, I’ve always had colleagues chime in and agree. Any time I have to traverse complex code like that, I have to have like 5 panes open in VSCode and sometimes I have to take rough notes, or diagram it out.

I have a suspicion that a lot of people, when faced with this problem, just say “Sure, looks good to me. It’s legacy, so it’s been working forever,” and carry on with their day.

But - I could be mistaken.

I find a nonlinear note taking app like Obsidian or Logseq to be helpful when I need to organize large amounts of information. Links and tags make it easy to traverse large amounts of data quickly, and since I link and tag however tf I want, I can usually follow my own thought process to rethink something if I have to.

Skim the book, “working effectively with legacy code”. In a nutshell, you write characterization tests around the module or method, then do safe IDE based refactorings, then do some slightly more significant refactorings. After that the code should make enough sense for you to make changes if you need to.

It is as much in art as a science. The important thing is that as you are doing refactorings, the main one you do is to extract methods, and give the methods clear names that say what they are doing. You should be left with a top-level method that reads like a narrative of what the whole thing does.

Medication helps me quite a bit. I am also using Atomoxetine. The effect is much more subtle than stimulants, but I think just as powerful in the long run.

Ironically these types of tickets are kinda my ADD superpower. I hyperfocus on understanding the entire flow until I fully understand every possible way the bug could occur, then fix it.

It’s when I’m trying to plan something from the ground up that the writer’s block hits me and I fall into procrastination and infinite rabbit holes till pressure is applied externally.

I don’t work in software, but networking, where I often have to work in CLI for configurations on multiple devices simultaneously. What I’ve been taught, and what’s worked for me, is drawing logical diagrams by hand with pen and paper when I’m working in a system that I think has the complexity level to get lost in. I don’t know for sure how well that will translate to software in general unfortunately.

Where that line is varies person to person, so you might only do it for those weird legacy systems. That’s usually how it is for me. This is how I best understand things in general. Laying them out physically in front of me and writing it all by hand in the format that I Intuit really helps me keep track of exactly where I’m working on what

Others have covered this well. From my experience (35 years), most “developers” write stream of thought code. It reflects how their brains process, without regard to others. When I have agency, I can steadily refactor the code to reduce indirection, nested if.then, etc. When I don’t, I’m in danger of being too slow in completing the work. Just lost my job for that reason while working with a 1000 line service entry method with a cyclomatic complexity of 310 and 34 class parameters. Coupled with being the acceptance tester as well, it makes it near impossible to succeed.

For extremely complicated code I used to create simple diagram sketches that illustrated the dependencies. It acted as a series of bookmarks to help keep my place. I think I have a smaller “working space” in my mind than non ADHD programmers. I think they can keep all that complexity in their mind at once while I cannot.

In a way, I turn that into an asset by writing code that I can reason about, which by definition requires it to be SOLID, and with minimal responsibility per function.

Lately, I’ve been using AI to generate sequence and class diagrams of the code to act as a high-level view of what’s going on. Major time saver.

For me, I’ll hop onto a new git branch and start renaming functions and variables to what they actually do.

I might drag some blocks of code out into new functions, just a real rough refactor to get both the flow and my understanding of each block in place.

Big if conditions get their own function, named what the intent is.

I work in Xcode, so we can add extra context to breakpoints. I recently discovered the bookmarks that are built in, and you can annotate them too!

Make a change, start from the top and make sure it reads ok and still makes sense.

It’s eating an elephant on repeat.

Taking amphetamines improves this ability and can fix your issue. But the reason, is because you don’t enjoy this as much as writing code. You enjoying what you do gives you executive power and control over what you focus on, and getting more money is not something that allows you to overcome this, if it’s not stimulating, it’s not as easy for you to do it. This comment is sponsored by by amphetamine.

Jk but I took the route of doing what I love and damn the money. I have to use what dopamine reserves and energy I have on other things in life, household and stuff, and if both drain me I am not as capable as if I adjust my priorities. And I have kids so it’s not hard to choose really. I still count this as a blessing, since when I do stuff I love and they don’t bore me, I can enjoy hyper focus and productivity, and then have energy for life too

Hi, I am a newbie coder who works on open source projects as a hobby. I usually take notes or draw diagrams of how do the things work.

I personally doubt many people are good at this, ADHD or not. Anyway, logging is the best way for me to “see” what’s going on. If you can output the name of the functions when they are called, you can see the order of what’s happening. Then, hone in on certain areas and add more landmark output statements to show major steps and intermediate results until you locate the problem.

Meds can help the focus required to stick with this tedious process. Logging is a great tool, and even better if you take the time to make it configurable.

I don’t know about intellij, I have worked mainly in VS Pro. I will tell you some of The things I can do in VS that help and then I’m sure intelliJ probably has similar functionality or plugins that will add it. Check to see if you can generate call graphs or call maps. VS enterprise has the ability to add each function to a graph and build up a diagram for you. Unfortunately pro and standard do not.
Ctrl + “-” will jump back to last. This allows you to reverse through the call tree.
You should be able to display a call stack that at least tells you how you got down to where you are.
Make notes about reimplements you want to make and move on. Sometimes just writing it down so you won’t forget is enough for my brain to let it go.
In VS Pro you can create a break point and then right click on the red break point dot and add conditions and\or actions. Conditions stop it from breaking there unless a condition is met, this is great when you only want to catch one iteration of a loop. Actions are something that will be evaluated and done like printing out information “$FUNCTION, myvar {my var}” will print out current function name, myvar, the value of myvar". You will be surprised how complex of a variable it will print. For instance it may print out an entire structure or contents of a class. You can then set the action to not break, that way the code performs the action and keeps going. Doing this will allow you to generate as detailed a list as you want of breakpoints in the order in which they get hit plus any variables you want to track.

Hello there, I’m a senior level dev former manager specialized in database shit.

It can absolutely be difficult to trace complex misleading function calls but part of the emphasis in coding should be readability and expressiveness (personally my opinion is that the highest cost in software development is maintenance and difficult to comprehend code multiplies this cost). If something is so complicated that, while it’s being written, it can’t be comprehended then that’d be a huge red flag for me and I’d likely leave comments on the review asking for the code to be better labeled (either better variable/function names, comments, clearer division of class/module responsibility) and refactored. This may not be possible pushback to give in your organization (which would be a big company red flag) but if you have difficulty comprehending it now you’ll have a lot of difficulty in the middle of an incident.

For me personally, I “trust” code labeling to help minimize the scope I need to keep in my head at any given time. If there’s a call out to saveFileToS3() I won’t inspect it now, I’ll just trust it does what it says on the tin and keep my scope limited to the current change set to comprehend that. Later on in the review when I reach the definition of saveFileToS3() if it does anything sneaky, doesn’t do anything necessary to that logical operation (like maybe the file is initially marked private and a second call is needed to mark the file as accessible) then I’ll flag that. Code factorization is a tool for clarity and you should rely on and reinforce it - and if you are trusting ot you should verify that.

It sorta sounds like your company may be drastically underinvesting in code maintenance (everyone under invests but there is a reasonable amount of investment to demand) though, that’s a red flag for me and may mean it’ll be difficult for you to function in that environment.

I’m a fairly early career dev, my job doesn’t really give me a lot of opportunity to write new code, instead I spend most of my time updating other people’s code, much of which is a legacy rat’s nest. Most of my time on a given story is spent trying to understand the code I’m given, and as I’m reading it I often feel like my eyes start drifting apart, it’s really hard to focus on it and understand the meaning.

The two most helpful things I’ve found are a) diagramming everything out. For that I have a big white board next to my desk, like 15 scattered notebooks and a tablet for onenote. b) my medication.

I was put on Ritalin about a year and a half ago, and (when I remember to take it) the difference is night and day. I wouldn’t say the medication makes the work easier, but it does make me feel motivated to do it and be less distracted even though it’s not work I necessarily want to be doing.

I do feel I should mention since you mentioned having some anxiety issues on other medication that I can end up with the save issue, but I’ve noticed that it only happens if I didn’t eat before taking it, or take it too late in the day to where it’s still fully in effect after I’m done working.

I also absolutely feel you on wanting to refactor everything that doesn’t make sense - it would make life so much easier, but I’m not allowed to do it -_-.