ADHD and corporate life

Work is where most of us spend most of our time, so it makes sense that ADHD traits shape the working experience in a big way.

In my case, large corporations have been both a relief and a trial. There are a lot of threads in this topic, and we could go deeper on almost all of them, but I want to at least sketch the major concepts from lived experience.

A quick level set, because my experience comes from a specific kind of workplace. I’ve spent my full-time career in three employers, all large US-headquartered technology companies, each with headcounts in the tens of thousands. I started work in 1996, which feels like yesterday in my head, but work culture has changed massively since then.

Repeatability

First it helps to understand how big companies are often structured. Large organisations tend to worship repeatability.

The holy grail is consistency. If you can standardise how work is done, you can automate parts of it, reduce mistakes, reduce cost, and scale. Variation is treated as risk. So work gets broken into smaller, well-defined parts. That reduces the amount of judgement required, which reduces the amount of “expensive brain” required, which reduces cost.

The knock-on effect is that roles and responsibilities, or at least the way people are measured, often become rigid and centrally defined. In global organisations that usually means designed somewhere in a different time zone and then applied everywhere. Even people management can become quite scripted, where your manager’s job is essentially to get the most performance out of you inside the machine.

I understand why this exists. You cannot run a big organisation without simplifying it. But it can be uncomfortable if you are neurodivergent and work best in a way that doesn’t neatly match the template.

Fit

I’ve often felt like a square peg in a round hole, and my career has largely been built around slightly unusual or niche roles.

Sometimes that’s been because I’ve worked with very new technology, where creativity and curiosity are required. Those two ingredients keep my ADHD brain interested. Other times it’s been because I’ve worked with customers or contexts that are slightly unusual for the company, which creates a niche where different thinking is useful.

The problem is that niche roles are the exception, not the rule.

I’m technical by upbringing. I hyperfocused on code in my teens. I’m also creative, and I’m a very people-oriented person. In many technical careers, roles tend to assume you can be strong in a maximum of two out of those three things. That combination makes you an edge case, and being an edge case can feel misunderstood.

In the past, I would read a role description and then try to bend myself to fit it as best I could. We all do that to a degree, but my default was always to blame myself if it felt difficult. Since my diagnosis, I’ve consciously tried to flip that around, and be far more honest about what my strengths really are, where I can bend and where bending becomes too much.

Shelf life

There is another pattern that shows up for me in corporate life.

If I do my job well in a niche role, it often becomes mainstream. New technology becomes normal technology. A special case becomes a standard offering. When it becomes mainstream, the work becomes more predictable, and predictability is where my interest goes to die.

For an ADHD brain, boredom is not mild. It is heavy.

I’ve usually dealt with that by spinning up side projects to keep myself nourished. Most employers love this because they get extra work without paying you more. But side projects also create their own tension. If you get deeply into them, it can make the “real work” feel even duller, and you can reach a point where you’re frustrated that you can’t spend more time on the thing you actually care about.

And if you’re not watching carefully, burnout can arrive quietly in that gap.

Performance

One of the strangest parts of this is that I’ve often been able to keep performing even when bored. In some ways that makes the situation worse.

If you are delivering what everyone expects and more, everyone is happy apart from you. And if you are reliably delivering the goods, people do not want you to leave.

The advantage of very large companies is that you can change roles without changing employers. You can get novelty without the upheaval of leaving the firm. I’ve moved around a few times in my career, usually with the blessing of my management.

I did have one manager try to use that as leverage to retain me, though. That points to another truth about big organisations.

Politics

Large organisations are political. People seek power, protect territory, build alliances, and sometimes play games.

That can be a tough environment for an ADHD person day to day, especially if you are sensitive, conscientious, and prone to overthinking.

Enough said there really. It is what it is wherever you work in the corporate world.

Structure

All of that said, I can also see how the structure of big companies has helped me. I am definitely a “big company” person without a doubt because big companies tend to be diverse enough to have variety, yet have well-established frameworks to run on.

When I was diagnosed, my psychiatrist pointed out that my structured secondary education and the expectations around me, while often painful, provided guardrails. They kept me on the straight and narrow.

I think large organisations have done something similar. They provide a machine to bounce off. They give the comfort of structure. They also create niches through scale, which has allowed me to do my thing inside a bigger framework.

I don’t think I could have been a business owner or full-time entrepreneur. I suspect I would have found it too stressful. The irony is that within the supporting structure of big companies, I can behave in an entrepreneurial way. I’m creative. I like people. I like building things. I just like doing it with guardrails, a learning which ultimately led to my realising I had autism as well as ADHD.

Innovation

Technology companies love the word innovation because competition moves fast and novelty is the product.

Being a divergent thinker helps here. It is one of the places ADHD can feel like an advantage. At IBM I filed over thirty patents, which I’m still proud of. That is divergent thinking in its most structured form.

You do have to harness it. Corporate structure can feel frustrating at times, but I’ve come to see that structure also gave me focus and discipline. I probably needed buffers to bounce off, even if they stung.

Allyship

I’ll finish this first pass through corporate life with something that genuinely matters to me.

One positive shift I’ve seen is the growth of employee communities and allyship, particularly in large corporates. When I was diagnosed, my company’s neurodiversity group had a chat channel. The relief of finding my people was huge. I could talk openly about what I was feeling and get both advice and support.

For balance, diversity and inclusion can be a corporate ticket-to-the-game. But it has created space to talk about neurodivergence, and that space matters.

Over the past year, this has become a new wave of motivation in my career. I want to improve the experience of neurodivergent people in my industry. I’m one person, but I’d love to make a small dent over the next couple of decades.

And that’s why this blog exists.