Ask HN: How true is it that most founders are taking drugs like Modafanil?
(Posting on throwaway for obvious reasons).<p>I was on Adderall for mild ADHD for 10 months in 2016. Software Engineers in my late 20s. I found that I was not finishing any of my side projects. Was working (and still do) for a FAANG. Consulted a real doc i.e Psychiatrist in San Francisco and he diagnosed me with very mild ADHD Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)<p>Apparently this is quite common in adults these days, esp. in high intensity brain-work related professions like Software Engineering, Finance &#x2F; Wall Street and such.<p>My prescribed dosage was 5 mg &#x2F; day of Adderall, the lowest possible dose. I was very concerned about long term side-effects and the doc assured me that it was perefectly safe. He said that it&#x27;s not the same as crystal meth like the media would have you believe. In my last outing , I mentioned the &quot;Take my Pills&quot; netflix documentary and his take was that the documentary featured extremes cases of very high dosages (the 3 people featuered were on atleast 50 mg &#x2F; day, = 10x my dosage) and also that 2 of the 3 didn&#x27;t have any ADHD or ADD symtoms - the football player and the girls in school.<p>Now for the effects, I can say it&#x27;s incredible. The first day I felt lazor like focus. I walked into work, and finished a javascript library that I&#x27;d been stuck on for days, in like 4 hours. I even helped a super-star Russian coder fix a nagging complex multi-threaded bug. I didn&#x27;t (and still don&#x27;t feel) &quot;high&quot; from it. What I feel is extremely sharp focus, like I notice very small things out of order and correct them, in codebase and outside in my daily life. In the first month or so, I also got lot of &quot;life-things&quot; that I&#x27;d be procrastinating on done, like I did my TRUST, Living Will etc.