Fellow adult with ADHD here, welcome to the club! What you’re feeling is referred to as “imposter syndrome” and it’s one of the more pesky symptoms of our particular affliction.

Just knowing it’s a symptom of ADHD has been a huge help to me… When those thoughts creep in, I just remind myself how hard I’ve had to work to get here.

I know for a fact that I had to study for some of my licensing exams three or four times longer than some of my coworkers, for example. Those coworkers don’t know that, and I wouldn’t care if they did, but I know how hard I’ve had to work to get where I am and I’m proud of it.

It sounds like you’re feeling imposter syndrome, which is normal. Just try to realize that you do belong, you made it because of your own hard work, and you aren’t alone in those feelings.

Hey OP, it sounds like you’ve worked hard to make positive changes in your life. After a lot of self activation like that it’s not uncommon to feel some side effects - namely a bit of anxiety or depression. A therapist would be beneficial.

In my experience, there’s two ends of the developer spectrum.

At one end is uptight. They have all their shit on lockdown and the confidence that comes with that.

The other end is creative. They are developers because they enjoy creating, and development is a rare high-paying but creative outlet. They stumble through everything and get bored with reading too much documentation.

I have seen many cases of both of these, and another, underlying metric is their perception of their own intelligence.

It’s unfortunate, but a lot of them grew up in an environment where they were the smartest person in the room and were rarely challenged. Now, being in an environment with many other smart people, they only feel smart by making others feel less than.

They purposely show off their knowledge and when you give an idea they shit on it and make you feel stupid.

There’s also this thing where if you know a system really well, it’s hard to imagine someone not having the knowledge you have. This is just how memory works because our brains abstract things away and then we can’t recognize when others don’t have that abstraction yet.

This is all normal. Humanity has a lot of work to do to change this, but it’s embedded into how everything works, so it’s not going to happen in our lifetime. You can change you, but you can’t change anything else.

With that being said, here are some things I have learned, being from a similar background as you:

1. Recognize that you are smart or you wouldn’t be there.

2. Accept that others will make you feel stupid. The best response is to act like it doesn’t phase you.

3. Don’t make others feel stupid if you can help it.

4. Be enthusiastic. Any shortcomings you may have, will be forgiven if you show up with a big smile on your face.

5. Talk to your managers. Ask them what would make you better at your job, and ruthlessly pursue bettering yourself. This will give you a lot of confidence.

6. You will lose touch with your old party friends. They will die young, and you will feel sad. When you do get a chance to catch up, talk to them a lot and consider journaling it. This will help a lot when you lose them.

7. You will feel guilty because you are doing so much better than them. Accept it and move on and try not to brag about your new life.

8. You will feel out of place because your new friends don’t have the same background as you. Accept it and move on. Nobody else is worried about it.

9. Your new friends will probably not be as interesting as your old friends, and you will feel yourself becoming less interesting. This is the price we pay for our new life. If you want to stay interesting find a way to be in touch with other creative people: musicians, teachers, English majors.

Make a joke out of it. One of my jobs was software support. When people asked what I did for work, I told them I provided technical and emotional support for frustrated lawyers.

When people ask you, tell them you are “in charge of writing code with bugs in it to keep the senior developers employed. It may or may not be intentional.”

I am going through this right now, but without the drugs.
Mid 30s, waking up to realise my life is a mess, working on getting a diagnosis for ADHD and possibly bipolar, and getting help with depression.
I am now fixing my life.
The biggest thing that is helping me is talking about it. Asking for help is important, but just sharing your experiences is also important.
It was a friend that shared his experiences with me that has put me on this journey of recovery.
Never any problem solving, or offering solutions or fixes. Just sharing and talking.

Anyway…

When I’m doing software dev stuff, I always feel out of my depth. I’m reading interesting articles from people way smarter than I am. I’m reading codebases that are a delight to read through and leave me in awe.
And I turn to my projects and work, and feel like a fraud. It’s all “standing on the shoulders of giants”, following tutorials just to get things to compile, locking myself out of VMs or network switches from dumb mistakes.
But I also work in live events, so still technical and a lot of smart people. But when there is a problem, or a unique problem to solve, I’m just like “yeh, the problem is here because…” or “why not just do this…”.
And these moments make me realise that perhaps I am not a fraud or an idiot. I just have different experience than my peers both in software development and live events. And there is some overlap.

I think a huge part of it is: everyone is making everything up all the time.
Some people have made something up before, so they can draw on that experience.
It’s always worth spending a little time introspecting some of your progress.
Spending less time googling issues, and realising you can figure stuff out (make stuff up) for yourself? Huge win.
Remembering correct syntax? Huge win.
Writing code that only has 1 or 2 bugs? Huge win.
Recognising that a problem is best solved using whatever pattern/library/etc? Huge win.

Imposter syndrome is real.
Dunning-kruger is also real.
And then the imposter syndrome makes you think you are in the dunning-kruger zone, and makes everything worse.
Recognizing the progress and successes helps

Imposter syndrome is pretty common and it sounds like you’ve put in a hell of a lot of work turning your life around, so that’s something you can and should be proud of.

In the meantime though; remember that often it’s not that they actually want to know, they’re just looking for common ground or something to talk about. You can be vague or redirect; “I’m in I.T.” (not a lie) or “I work for a (whatever industry you dev for) company.” (also not a lie) and turn the question back on them. Then ask follow up questions. Most people love to talk about themselves, just give them an excuse.

Stop caring? It’s just your job, there’s also doctors and lawyers and architects and …

You reply you’re a software developer. Either the topic ends there or how it often happens you get follow up questions like “What do you work on?” or “How to learn programming?”.

People are usually curious instead of jealous or annoyed. It’s just a conversation.

To me you turning your life around sounds impressive. Despite your condition you achieved something awesome. Software developer sounds like as good a job as any. Absolutely respectable in my book. And you got plenty of time to climb the career ladder.

Also if you hang with lots of smart people and don’t think of yourself as smart, chances are you are smarter than you give yourself credit for.

You had a journey, a struggle, to get where you are. You don’t need to impress everyone or check all the conventional boxes in order to have a compelling life story.

One of the long lingering effects of mental and socioeconomic afflictions is that we don’t ever believe we are worthy.

For what it’s worth I’m in retail and I have been most of my life, I don’t have much ambition to climb the economic ladder because it basically demands we sell our souls, that said I don’t begrudge anyone with a better paying and less stressful job. Also we absolutely need working class solidarity between tech workers and “blue collar” or “low skill” jobs. These are all preconceptions that are instilled in us to create divisions among working people.

Basically, it sounds to me like class consciousness and maybe joining a communist organization or looking into forming a union if there are points to agitate on among your coworkers might help you find what you are looking for.

Imposter syndrome is definitely a real thing though.

You’re not pretentious for telling people what your job is, you’d only be pretentious if you held to some notion that it is any more important work than that of the person serving you food or selling your groceries.

A fraud, you say? That’s called imposters syndrome. I suffered big time from it too.

But you went to school and passed the required classes. You’re not a fraud.

I fucked up a bunch in my early years too, until I was diagnosed with a severe form of MTHFR. Once I got on the right meds, my lifelong brainfog went away, and I could suddenly do all the tasks I found so difficult to do prior, including study. Went back to school. Now I design Substations.

I also get the feeling sometimes that I’ve faked my way into the job I have. But no. I went to school and passed the classes. I’m supposed to be here.

So are you.