Coding Interviews, ADHD, and Staying Focused with Mihai Todor

Welcome back to Autistic Techie.

Today I'm joined by another member of the neurodiverse and tech community, Mihai Todor.

He is an open source software engineer, proud neurodivergent self advocate, and him and I had a chance to be on a neurodiversity and tech panel a few weeks ago.

He's got so much knowledge about open source, about freelancing, being a really strong self advocate and being really thoughtful about his needs, how he interacts with other

people, how he interacts in his workplace.

I'm excited for him to get a chance to tell his story.

Mihai, thank you so much for coming on Autistic Techie.

Thank you Shea and thank you for having me.

So my name is Mihai and I'm based in Dublin, Ireland.

I work as a freelance software engineer and my pronouns are he, him.

Originally I'm from Romania and I spent, I guess, the better part of the past 18 years in tech as a software engineer then end up working as a principal, mostly in the SaaS space.

So I worked with some small and large companies building their backend infrastructure, scalable systems, microservices, public cloud things.

And more recently I specialized in the field of data streaming.

And I don't just mean I don't really mean video or audio.

I literally mean structured data streaming when you have to like take data from some database engine or some other system where you have all sort of information about your

platform and users and everything that you do in terms of product and send it somewhere else and maybe transform it in flight and when you have to do this in a reliable way in a

scalable way fault tolerant etc.

All those nice things

the systems tend to get quite complicated and involved and yeah that's a big challenge in many companies.

Me having been a CTO at a startup, I totally understand the complexities of having to manage so many different systems, big things, small things, interconnected things,

integrating other people.

I'm curious, what does neurodiversity mean to you and what is your journey with it looked like?

In my case, some years ago, I was still struggling with some of the aspects of doing work and I realized that my approach is quite different from other people around me.

And I tend to fit most of the ADHD memes.

Do you have a preferred source you get your ADHD memes from?

all over the internet.

It used to be, know, like the Twitter and Facebook, I know those back in the days when they were more user friendly.

And these days, you know, I have more niche communities.

I prefer to be in semi-private, semi-public communities like Slack, Discord, some Mastodon and a bit of Blue Sky.

And, you know, yeah.

like the homegrown organic grown memes.

Yeah, And there's just, you know, like literally in this ND in Tech community where there's usually a flood on Monday, you know, like, Meme Monday.

I've seen those and I have definitely contributed to Meme Monday on NDIT.

Does it have an acronym?

Does that communicate?

If it says NDIT, is that appropriate or we using the long form?

I usually go for ND in tech, but I'm not sure.

ND in Tech is good.

I don't know any better, so I'm gonna go with ND in Tech.

Something you mentioned that I'm also curious about is that you moved from Romania to Ireland.

What has been the experience or your personal journey with how people perceive neurodiversity moving from those two countries?

Did you find that that was a drastically different experience?

Was it about the same?

I'm pretty curious.

I mean, I a detour through the Netherlands.

And my first experience in Romania, working in tech was pretty, you know, ad hoc.

I worked for this kind of a small company, you know, apartment based and we were literally allowed to do kind of whatever we wanted because I was also in university and I couldn't

really, you know, be on a delivery line.

It has to be done by tomorrow or else.

So that was one of the best jobs I ever had because it gave me free roaming experience and I could just go in there and like,

You know open a book and spend the whole day reading a book which was kind of unheard of in other jobs I've had like you could do it, but it would be so awkward for you because

you'd have peers around you who You know they would all be busy and you'll be like sitting on a chair reading a book, which is just not you know

Was this a coding job or were you doing something else at the same time?

I started with a software engineering job in my third year of university and that was, you know, like the first expectations were around

also outsourcing projects like related to e-commerce, related to auctions, some sort of desktop software that they were using for construction companies and also random projects

that let me explore lot of technologies.

Like I started with C-sharp, then went to Perl, then went to PHP and JavaScript and got to explore lot of things that normally you wouldn't get to experience if you take like a

senior engineer job because you're just kind of focused.

you got a chance to pick the technologies that you felt were exciting or were right for the job.

And you mentioned as well you had like the freedom to do your own thing.

Was that freedom in what you were doing, in how you were doing it, or both or something else?

Yeah, so one aspect of what I believe is ADHD is having this...

desire to seek new things.

So then I tend to get bored pretty easily and I always like to discover new technologies, new aspects of tech that I haven't really explored.

And there's some things that interest me and other things that are instantly just a huge turn off and I would rather do anything else than to like continue reading that.

So that was kind of a good thing to let me kind of pick the ideas that I like and then kind of focus more on the back end side of things.

or the more technically involved aspects.

And when I took my second job, that was exactly how I ended up like doing maybe three tasks a week versus my colleagues who would do like maybe 10.

The role was more of technical support.

So imagine that I'd have to dig into documentation and debug some complex issues in backend infrastructure and most of user-reported bugs.

And always the more complex bugs with my plan.

Yeah.

You mentioned as well, like avoiding things that you were disinterested in.

Are there anything to technology that you are very strongly disinterested in that you avoid touching if you can help it?

Well, I mean, I never really had a great time with UI and it's mostly because of the validation side of things.

I tend to get very...

let's say passionate about making sure that you don't get into inconsistencies and bad user experiences, which can be off-putting because you just can't win.

There's no way to check every possible corner case and everything.

So then, you know, I end up spending way more time than I should just trying to go through all those scenarios and understanding how users might try to break it.

As a front-end UI person, totally get that and I do empathize with your pain.

It's something that I struggle with on a day-to-day basis.

Things like automated testing and TypeScript help a little bit, but there's still really crazy ways people can end up in strange interfaces or strange UIs.

I totally understand that.

And when you were mentioning the freedom to work how you wanted, what were some challenges you were trying to circumvent there?

What were you trying to do to help your brain, your way of working, be as effective and as low cost to you as possible?

Well, I mean, at my first job, I wasn't really trying to be effective.

I was trying to learn.

uh Most of the things I had in university as courses weren't really tailored for this career path.

So I'm kind of self-taught, I would say, because while I did have some basics of algorithms and C++ and whatnot, I never really had compiler theory or anything related to

web frameworks or whatever it is that I tend to need for my day to day.

So having that kind of freedom to explore and learn, that was rewarding and beneficial.

Also, it wasn't really what I wanted to do for a career, but it did pay the bills.

And I think there's a compromise there that everyone has to make, know, find something that you like, but it might not be exactly what you want to do for your career.

Yeah, you brought up an interesting point.

Doing something that you want to do, that you like doing, but maybe doesn't help you along in your career.

How have you been able to indulge in that, if at all?

Have you found opportunities to be able to do things that you like, even if they're not directly career adjacent?

Yeah, I mean, I was chased after more research-oriented work.

I started with machine learning back in 2010, 2012, when the first, I guess it was the predecessor of Coursera, know, like mlclass.org and stuff like that.

And I was fascinated.

I'm like, this is amazing.

Can I turn that into work?

And unfortunately, I couldn't.

It became this kind of elite space where everybody and their grandma wanted to do AI and ML.

So I ended up getting a bit frustrated with that and, you know, like after reading for years, you know, various papers and trying to tinker myself at home with machine learning

algorithms and such, was like, okay, this is just not working for me.

So I specialized on distributed systems and tried to make a living out of that, which, you worked out.

But these days I'm trying to volunteer in the biotech space.

One thing that I did realize over the years is that

The product alignment is a lot more important than the actual technology.

I used to kind of, you know, look at people and say, I don't want to touch this technology because it's just not fun for me.

These days I'm like, yeah, whatever.

I don't care if it's like hobble or whatever it is.

I would rather learn that if I'm very passionate about the product and the product space.

When you say product alignment, what do you mean by that?

Well, first of all, it's kind of the space in which that product gets used.

So for me in particular, I would care about something that can innovate certain areas of research.

not sure if that's the right way of saying it, but what I literally mean is, for example, in biotech, there's people working on cancer treatments using immunotherapy.

And those are very specialized roles.

There's people in the lab doing something with some cells, trying to modify them and putting them back in the human body, and hopefully it attacks solid tumors.

And those people need a lot of support in terms of computational effort to kind of visualize that data in better ways, do some of the modeling, maybe apply some machine

learning to their data to get more insights out of it.

There's a thing called epigetic clocks, which I find quite fascinating.

So I can go into more detail if you're curious.

I think I'm curious.

What I'm hearing is like it's the alignment between the type of work that's being done and the need for that work to be done in the first place, whether that's aligned with business

goals or in this case it sounds like more research goals.

I'm curious to hear more about that resolution between what the business wants and business can be a replacement for an academic or a scientific setting.

I know it's not always a business.

but the resolution between what the business or the organization needs and what the science is actually doing.

I'm curious about that.

yeah, I mean, I've observed this a lot of times while I worked in various companies.

They usually have a walled garden where they tend to hire people with PhDs and they say, hey, you you're gonna do the blue sky work, you know, build some prototypes, show how to

translate the research you've been doing into an actual product.

And I was oftentimes envious of that team because I couldn't find any meaningful way to work directly with them.

I might get some work that they did and then be asked to translate into production, which is fine.

But it did feel like my work was always very far detached from what they were doing and from what the business needed in the future.

So it felt like my work was, you know, fixed the current business need of, you know, making users happy.

and maybe get a better product that the stakeholders can sell or they can get some sort of value out of having the current product be a tiny bit better.

But there's other people who work on the version, the future version of the product, which I never really had access to.

Let's build something new from scratch that fills the niche.

Do you find that your ADHD helped or hindered your ability to further your career goals?

I feel that it does drive me in certain ways.

There's, you know, I have some friends or some connections who when talking to me and, you know, discussing about my experience, they say, hey, you you should seek some sort of

therapy.

It would help you cope better, you know, kind of find more comfort in your current situation.

I'm like, well, that's not really what I want.

I do want my drive to continue being there.

I do want to...

continue feeling this inner, how to call it, yeah.

Not really anxiety, I think it's also kind of a desire to do something else.

So were your coworkers worried that you trying too much to do different things?

Or what exactly was their concern?

So that's interesting because I've never felt I had a job where I got negative reviews.

I did have one where I got less than stellar feedback from my manager, but it was never anything like, you're likely to end up on a PIP or whatever.

So there's something in me that just prevents me from completely failing.

I know I've done work that was less than perfect, and I'm guilty of that, and I can't really prevent it.

in spite of, you know, having undiagnosed ADHD.

But there's something in me that kind of drives this feeling of responsibility.

Like you have this role, no matter how much you're paid, you do have to deliver.

And that, you know, there's a tension between that and like, you know, maybe today I want to spend an hour reading a biology book, but I'm also feeling very responsible to deliver

what I was asked and what I'm paid for.

So what can you do?

Well, I am curious what you do in that situation.

Are you finding that you're able to balance the wants of what you want to do with the needs and what you have to do for your job?

How do you, in your brain, think about that as far as structuring your time or knowing how to structure your time?

Well, know, unfortunately the blue sky stuff does suffer.

So I have weeks or maybe months where I just don't have the energy to do what I would love to do.

And that, you know, I take that as, as it is.

Like I don't feel like...

I've really failed at this and I hate it.

It's more like, you know, I know I have to pay my bills.

I know I need to have a job, which has been a challenge at times.

Like I'm not the most successful person when it comes to passing interviews, which is a problem.

And that has forced me to make certain compromises.

Like I definitely took jobs that I really didn't want, but you know.

I really wanted to have an interview subject because as I was looking more into you and researching for this podcast, your GitHub bio, and think your LinkedIn too has a big

disclaimer at the top of it that I want to repeat to people on this because I think it's really brilliant.

Your GitHub and your LinkedIn say, I have a personal policy against any type of live coding or online coding tests during interviews.

I don't enjoy or engage in any form of competitive programming.

Otherwise, I'm happy to work offline on coding assignments with reasonable goals and deadlines and to have in-depth technical discussions about software architecture and

design, as well as relevant technologies.

I applaud you for being very honest and very forthcoming with what works for you in your brain.

Can you talk to me about how you came to put a disclaimer out there?

Thank you first of all for noticing that.

Not that many people see it, although I did make it in your face because...

It's big and bold at the top of your GitHub.

says, disclaimer.

If someone is going to look at your GitHub and ask you to apply for a job, that has to be the first thing that they see.

The only thing that I would say is, if you could make it big colors or big, animations, maybe it would make it more obvious.

But it also might be a turn off.

I'm not sure if I want to go further than that.

I think that's good enough.

But I'm still su- I'm still surprised to see that there's certain people who don't notice it still.

and they ping me with jobs that are obviously not going to work for me.

It has landed there from frustration.

I spent about eight years trying to get into one of the fine companies, know, and back then, let's say, you know, after 2010, 2012, it did feel very compelling to try and get

into a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera, et cetera.

And I always felt like, oh, you know, I should be able to do this.

Like I'm already quite senior in my work and I have all this experience.

And I never understood why, you know, that would be good enough to try and, you know, aim for a top job in this space, you know.

Maybe, I'm not sure if it's a top job, but more like one of the top software houses that everybody wants to be in.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Magma.

manga i'm not sure the correct pronunciation magma did someone look did netflix go is netflix no longer a part of it

I'm not sure, I think that's what I read last time or maybe I'm confusing it completely.

I'm curious who now I got to figure out who the second is.

I don't know who that would be.

Whatever the acronym is, Fang, Manga, Mangaba, I understand and appreciate and also empathize with the interview funnel that happens for those companies.

I've been through them loads of times and they're stressful for neurodivergent people.

What was your experience like going at over and over and over?

Yeah, I mean the first thing that I realized and Microsoft was the first company that interviewed me of that caliber.

The experience was pretty distressing because I thought I did well and then they told me I'm okay after two interviews and I went home and I'm like, okay, so there's gonna be some

follow up.

This went well.

It turned out it went really poorly.

And that was the first time I tried this and I wasn't prepared.

I didn't know how to prepare.

was still in Romania.

I had no clue how this all works.

And I started learning.

I'm like, okay, I understood the whole star framework.

I started formulating all this behavior.

interview answers that I should answer and all of that and you know I think I'm pretty good at that but then I always always bumped into someone who requires me to go in at the

whiteboard and code in front of them and unfortunately that has not worked for me and it will probably never work out just because it's one of the most stressful experiences I can

imagine it gives me excited just thinking about it

And I felt that quite a few people who do that kind of, who are interviewers for that kind of interview, are not trained or have no interest in training themselves to create a safe

space for developers who are not comfortable with it.

So I found myself in some situations where some people really belittled me and treated me like, or made me feel that I'm not...

even like a junior level because I just can't seem to like force my brain to focus immediately on their interview question.

And you know, some people have really not behaved well and you know, it's like scar tissue.

Once it piles up enough, you get to a point where I'm like, okay, this is enough.

I'm never gonna do this again because I just don't want to.

I'm sorry to hear that interviewers have given you a hard time for that sort of thing.

In a setting like that, people should not be reaming you for that that feels like really weird behavior.

And I definitely empathize with that sense of the word you used was excitement.

And I take that to mean like a form of stress too.

Is that what you meant by the excitement?

I think so.

mean, you know, just to describe it a bit better.

you know, whenever I had exams in university that, you know, I felt not super well prepared for, or, you know, this kind of interviews, things that happened to me or I

experienced are increased heart rate, you know, I sweat, like my hands get cold, my voice gets shaky.

I even had, know, I'm not sure if you know this medical condition, it's adjectic eczema when you get small blisters on your hand.

I I've heard of it.

So I've had that happen to me after going through an interview, like I literally probably sweated too much or something.

I just like end up with blisters on my hand.

I'm like, why am I doing this?

Yeah, like, don't be in a situation if it's causing you not just mental stress, but physical stress and discomfort.

And you know, like talking to people, it has not been once that somebody suggested to me, hey, you should see some medication for this.

But then again, there's some, you know, kind of tension in my head where I'm like, I only need medication for this particular scenarios that they can blissfully avoid because,

well, look, I had 10 jobs so far and, you know, they didn't require me to code in front of them.

So.

it's a weird scenario.

actually have really put a lot of thought into how I approach interviews.

You mentioned the behavioral interviews, the STAR method, those sort of things where it's funny you say that.

Do you think that those are the ways that you succeed in?

Do you feel comfortable with behavioral and STAR and stuff like that?

Well, my work did push me more towards the tech leadership side of things and areas where I have to kind of, you know, guide more junior engineers, design architectures for complex

systems.

And I don't just mean, you know, like there's this conception that if you're a software engineer, you have to design compilers and build something low level, like, I don't know,

let's say Kafka or something like that.

But

If you go in a big company, those are just building blocks.

What they literally mean is designing business products that interact with each other in very non-obvious ways and require lot of domain knowledge to kind of understand how to

navigate and draw diagrams that maybe non-technical people are comfortable reading and so on and so forth.

It's funny because when it comes to the behavioral side of things, I definitely find that I struggle with that side.

The coding challenges and the whiteboard stuff I also struggle with.

But to me, when I hear, me about a time that you dot dot dot, I feel like my tongue just becomes like an anchor in my mouth.

Has that ever happened to you?

Because it sounds like that's where you succeed.

And I'm a little jealous, to be honest.

Well, I mean, I would call it a success if it doesn't feel me, if it doesn't make me feel anxious.

So, whenever I have those kind of questions, I feel that I can just keep talking and talking and talking because I've had a wealth of examples in my experience by changing

companies every two years and, you know, kind of reading other people's experiences and trying to internalize what they describe there and relating to my experiences and working

through those in my head, you know, like often, you know, in exquisite detail because one thing that

I am prone to is to ruminate a lot.

As you are aware now, the political situation can be bit distressing for people.

And there's people on various sides of the table.

I don't want to call anyone out, but there are situations where they might be completely opposite to me.

And I'm pretty progressive, liberal, et cetera.

And you know, like whenever I hear someone kind of raging at me for having those views, it just distresses me and makes me like spend hours and hours thinking, how can I reply to

this person to stop them from feeding such anger at me and, you know, lashing out for no good reason.

There's a perfect XKCD for the way you describe this, whatever's happening.

It's like, I can't go do this thing.

Someone is wrong on the internet and I have to spend all of my energy trying to correct them or to make myself feel better that I put myself out there.

I empathize with that too.

The topic of neurodiversity has unfortunately become much more political than it has been in years past.

And I've...

been on the receiving end of a lot of those politics and conversations.

I can only imagine that it's stressful for you even though you're not in the United States.

It's still out there.

It's still a topic people talk about.

Yeah, it's distressing and I feel that the SKCD meme paints this picture of an angry person who's trying to correct someone, whereas I'm more of a people pleaser and I get

distressed when somebody is not pleased with me for what is most likely misunderstanding.

I tend to be...

Yeah.

on a whiteboard, like they're looking for a specific set or subset of answers.

And if you don't match exactly what they want to, even if you're confident you got it right, that can be stressful.

I've had situations before where I've gone up on a whiteboard, I've answered the question and I solved the problem, but not in the way that they wanted me to.

And I'm like, well, I did what you asked.

What do you mean it's wrong?

This works.

This is what you need me to accomplish and it's reasonably performant.

What more do you want?

And the neurodivergent urge to try to figure out what do you mean?

Can you just say it?

It's stressful.

Well, I can tell you I had an exam in 2005, I believe.

And there was one question there that tricked me completely.

I chose a very different approach than what I should have, and it was wrong.

And I never got an answer for what was the right approach.

It still bothers me that I don't know what was the right solution for it.

It's a mystery.

We've both sure experienced wrong formula, right answer, or wrong formula, but slightly different answer.

I remember in school, if I slightly misapplied a formula, I would get the question wrong, but I get partial credit for partially applying the rest of it correctly, just get points

off for the wrong aspect of it.

That's right, that's right.

Yeah.

Mihai, this has been an excellent conversation and I learned so much about your perspective on interviewing and your own honesty.

If people want to find you on the web and connect with you, where can they do that?

Thank you so much.

I'm usually available in most spaces.

I'm on LinkedIn.

You can find me with slash im slash mtodor.

I'm on Blue Sky, Mihai Todor.

And I'm in some semi-public communities.

Like for example, I can't praise enough the ND in tech community and the RANDS leadership slack, which I also very much like.

I've bumped into you on the RANDS Slack a couple of times, I see you there every once in a while.

It's actually my main social media right now.

It's like a mini Reddit, but a nice Reddit, know, a Reddit where people are not anonymous and they don't troll each other and there's some clear guidelines of how you should behave

as a leader.

And I appreciate that.

I definitely have scrolled a lot of those Slack channels looking for content and posting some content myself there.

I will make sure that all of your links are in the show notes for this episode and I'll make sure that your GitHub is up there with your honest and very truthful disclaimer.

Mihai, thank you so much for this awesome conversation.

Thanks for being a part of it.

It was lovely to be part of it and see you next time.

See you next time.