https://orkohunter.net/blog/the-trap-of-introversion/

I keep coming back to this article, it's living in my head, but not in a good way.

Aditya

On this one particular night, a lot of people were bonding, and it was amazing. But then I saw this young boy sitting in the corner by himself. Let’s call him Aditya. It was a bit dark and Aditya was trying to just get by, unnoticed. He looked overwhelmed and disinterested. I went up to him with a big smile and a lot of kindness, and said - “Hey man, what’s up? Why don’t you approach and talk to a few here? They are friendly, you know. You like Open Source, so maybe talk to that guy (pointing to a senior of mine) and ask him how he got started.”.

His response that day still echoes in my ear. It felt like a voice coming out of a closed heart. And my words had fallen flat on him. He said, with a smirk, “I am not an extrovert”.

I looked into his eyes and saw the disgust for everyone in the room. Aditya was a proud introvert, as I like to call them. Little did he know that most people in that club were introverts, true nerds. They would rather sit in front of the computer than go out during the yearly college social fest. Yet, Aditya thought he is unique and does not belong there.

The sheer irony of someone critiquing another person for poor social skills, but being so bad at actively introducing and subtly drawing them in the group via "hey, this is XYZ, you both like open source" -- pot, kettle, black? There are far better ways to involve a new person. Feel free to call them an aloof asshole if they respond to a direct introduction with a literal smirk and introvert-villain-cape-twirl.

Also, indifference != hostility, disgust, hatred, etc. Indifference isn't a negative, it's neutral. I'm not everyone's cup of tea, everyone is not my cup of tea. I'd bore most people to tears rambling about this annoying article, I'm sure, just as it bores me to tears hearing about the latest exploits of my coworker's spouse/children/friends in excruciating detail. All's fair, neither is correct, it's just preference and whether people "click" or not.

I understand the underlying point to be "networking is necessary and good for career advancement and making connections." That is generally accurate. However, there's a way to phrase that without also negging the aloof person off to the side and presuming their aloofness arises from "pride."

Ram/Shyam

Allow me to paint you a picture. Ram and Shyam are two senior engineers in a team. ... Ram has been writing code for five years. He likes to sit in a cave and do his work. He has often rescued the team in situations with critical bugs. However, he’s a bit shy and doesn’t like to share what he is working upon. He’d rather disappear for a week to finish the work than collaborate with others. As a result, he is less visible to his colleagues and leadership.

Shyam has also been writing code for five years. You wouldn’t call him a genius like Ram, but he asks excellent questions. Not trying to be intentionally difficult, but he likes to ensure that everyone is on the same page. He likes to break down his 5 days of work, in smaller chunks and often invites others to collaborate with him. He’s good at being transparent and delegating. Likewise, he’s always excited to do a demo and talk about his work with colleagues from different teams. As a result, he is more visible to everyone around him.

The manager likes both equally. But when the budget is tight and he or she has to promote only one of them, everyone favors Shyam slightly more than Ram. Natural biases.

The Ram/Shyam comparison story just comes across as a managerial preference for those making consistent visibility noise regardless of the content and usefulness. "Inviting others to collaborate" comes across as trying to make other people do your work, and "frequently demoing for others" comes across as annoying other people with useless bullshit they don't care about.

Again, I understand the underlying point. There an imbalanced organizational (and cultural?) preference toward and reward for the talk-and-demo style of work. That is not news, The Organization Man was writing about this in 1956:

In some cases the business demand has also infuenced them in the type of man they favor in the selection of students and the awarding of scholarships. One Dean of Freshmen told me that in screening applicants from secondary schools he felt it was only common sense to take into account not only what the college wanted but what, four years later, corporations' recruiters would want. "They like a pretty gregarious, active type," he said. "So we find that the best man is the one who's had an 80 or 85 average in school and plenty of extracurricular activity. We see little use for the 'brilliant' introvert who might spend the rest of life turning out essays on obscure portions of D. H. Lawrence's letters."

Don't mistake me for taking the opposite extreme position in that "disappearing into a cave and never speaking about your work is actually a pure good" either. Too much of either working style (in an individual or organization) leads to problems. Excess in the first leads to overlap, duplicated work, and incogruent pieces that don't fit together. Or, in a worst case scenario, a dreaded "uh, nothing is done" update after six weeks of silence.

I wonder, though: whose work contributes and saves actual dollars? Are demos really equivalent work to rescuing the team via critical bugfixes? Both of those are hard to tally and quantify, sure, but one of those consists of more nebulous, qualitative contributions to work -- e.g., driving the company's engineering culture, sharing ideas that can be repurposed elsewhere. The other -- e.g., fixing a production bug that causes downtime, optimizing something to consume less resources -- results in lost/gained dollars.

So what happens when everyone realizes the game to be played and focuses energy and output toward that second category of work to chase promotions? Who's gonna fix those critical bugs?

A Moment of Petulant Bitterness

Relevant:

How do weak engineers survive at the senior+ level? They do a lot of one-way pairing. If you’ve ever paired with these engineers, it’s a very unpleasant experience, since you have to do all the work, whether driving or navigating. Often the pairing is discreet - they’ll quietly reach out to another engineer on the team in DMs for help on every single task they have. Sometimes there’ll be one unlucky victim who gets their time used like this: for instance, an effective junior on the team who’s happy to help and too inexperienced to know better. More savvy weak engineers will round-robin their pairing across the team, so each individual member might only need to chip in every week or so. Only when everyone compares notes does it become clear that the weak engineer is pairing on 100% of their tasks.

🤔 Smells like weakness: inviting others to collaborate and delegating off work. Coworkers who conflate sending Slack messages and scheduling collaborative meetings with getting shit done exist everywhere.

My uncharitable, mean, and frankly bitter take is that one of those people is worse at the technical aspects of their job, overly reliant on collaboration, and compensates via excessive noisemaking... especially when paired with Shyam's preference for neatly broken apart, smaller chunks of work. The other excels at independent problem-solving and unplanned, critical tasks.

And it's straight-up stupid that one is consistently valued and rewarded over the other.

I do often (idealistically, foolishly, fruitlessly) wish the world was quieter and made more space. Most particularly when it comes to work. More of this. I'm more or less of the mind of Susan Cain:

Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time--second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to "pass" as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness.

Instead of framing interaction style preference and energy expenditure as a personal failing on behalf of the introvert, which must be changed in the individual, maybe we're missing out on the contributions of a pretty large underclass. Maybe it's more like organizations and groups excessively focus on lazy, easily gamed metrics like visibility.

This faculty of concentration is likely to characterize the introverts' careers. Whereas extraverts tend to broaden the sphere of their work, to present their products early (and often) to the world, to make themselves known to a wide circle, and to multiply relationships and activities, the introvert takes the opposite approach. Going more deeply into their work, introverts are reluctant to call it finished and publish it, and when they do, they tend to give only their conclusions, without the details of what they did. This impersonal brevity of communication narrows their audience and fame, but saves them from overwhelming external demands and allows them to return to another uninterrupted stretch of work. As Jung is reported to have said, the introverts' activity thereby gains in depth and their labor has lasting value. (Gifts Differing)

LeARn SkilLZ

Instead of hiding behind some sort of pride in a personality trait, you should recognize the necessary skills and learn them, especially at work.

It's not a matter of being socially and communicatively unskilled. From my perspective:

• I talk about the work I'm doing.
• I give updates when I'm working on a longer-term thing.
• I respond to questions others pose.
• I help coworkers when they ask for it and make a sincere, concerted effort to ask questions about the problem to understand their specific situation, as opposed to dolling out generic platitudes.
• I ask for help when I need it, after I've put a sufficient amount of time into the problem.
• I tell people when things are going sideways, and I do so early, not five minutes before the next client check-in.
• I share neat new things when I find them.
• I follow up when something seems to slide off of the radar (in one instance three times over three weeks).
• I've even engaged in the nauseating act of walking my manager through a longer-term project in a 1:1 purely for purposes of self-promotion and trying to "Shyam it up."

Am I an expert doing social jujutsu with effortless grace? Funny joke, no. But I'm pretty sure I'm hitting core expectations.

My main arena of struggle seems to be in group conversations and "brainstorming" with others, plus some minor speech-relevant issues (e.g., trouble finding the right word). While I know there's an expectation to speak and share my thoughts, I don't have any thoughts to share. Whatever we're talking about is too much Managementese, too organizationally abstract, or generally above my pay grade for me to coherently put thoughts together in a real-time meeting. I really don't have thoughts about [large, organizational issue] yet, I'm just hearing about it now in this meeting with five other people, each of whom is talking in turn.

I also have Concerns™ about some of my thoughts being not-quite-palatable to management and the general public. Such as "maybe make room for quieter people":

• Pre-shared agendas whenever possible so people can prepare thoughts ahead of time.
• Purposeful inclusion for quieter people. Not a huge fan of "let's all go around the room" but "hey, what do you think?" would be neat.
• Comfort with a few moments of silence while everyone gathers their thoughts, or even intentional moments of silence for everyone to collect their brain goo into communicable format.
• Write down (and don't AI generate) meeting notes at the end and keep them well-organized and accessible, and review them before the next meeting.

Those seem like the dead opposite of standard operating procedure: more talk, more procedure, more process, more noise, more meetings, go faster, do more.

I do struggle with the split and competing desires of self-preservation in keeping my trap glued shut, and knowing I have to contribute, communicate, and make noise regardless of the content of that noise. Excessive silence attracts several negative labels -- people are quick to conflate it with stupidity, disinterest, etc. especially in workplaces.

I was never actually critiqued about communication (on the contrary, it was complimented now and again) until I joined a loud, detail-oriented, poorly-organized job full of seemingly more extroverted personalities. From my perspective it feels like I'm talking sufficiently and clearly, but there is such noise that I'm drowned out and need to engage in exhaustive repetition to be heard. It is a me problem given my unwillingness (inability?) to change, so perhaps my circumstances are due for change.

I pretty regularly run into instances of socially unskilled behavior from more extroverted types:

• I have spent upwards of ten minutes in a meeting previously where two coworkers turned a four person group session into a two-way back and forth and just... forgot to leave space for anyone else. I do have trouble breaking in and sharing my piece in those instances. I don't want to interrupt an obvious existing flow, bulldoze, and potentially derail the ongoing conversation. I'm glad they were able to catch such a productive vibe, but it'd be nice to see a little more self-awareness.
• I've very patiently allowed an overtalking, oversharing coworker to burn ten minutes of a fifteen minute meeting talking about their children (despite being quite annoyed at the interaction and disrespect for my time). In that instance the purpose of the meeting was to share negative feedback... so it made good sense to build up a bit of good will (truly awful social skill, huh?).
• And callback to the Aditya story and the terrible "introduction" attempt.

But sure, social skill foibles are purely the realm of the introvert.

Excuse

They use introversion as an excuse to not grow.

Grow toward what?

I don't want to be a manager. The idea of spending my day engaging in the more abstract realm of "people management" sounds like nightmarish hell-on-earth. I wouldn't be good at it. The organization in which I manage would suffer a net negative and detriment. The amount of money I would need to take that job is not an amount of money any organization would be willing to pay, and they'd be getting a terrible trade for that dollar.

Same goes for other flavors of thought leadership. Ivory-tower architectural astronaut bullshit and driving the company's technology culture doesn't appeal. The idea of producing a widely-lauded LinkedIn thought leadership article induces only bilious nausea, and that sure isn't arising from social anxiety.

Networking? My network is small, but I'm not sure I struggle with professional connection. I wrote (and edited out) four instances of long-running, deeply valued network connection just from this past week. It was easy to come up with examples. New network connection, okay, you got me -- but why is it important to have an ever-expanding network? It also strikes me as ruthlessly transactional to maintain connections with people purely for the sake of "what can you do for me?" purposes. That's just how the world works, sure, but I'm not a fan. For sure it is "who you know, not what you know" but I seem to have managed alright without rubbing too many shoulders.

Friends -- a dangerous swerve toward the personal? Yeah, I have four of those, look at me go. That, plus a smattering of family, is beyond sufficient for my social fulfilment needs. The door is closed, the open invitations are no more, we're good here. For actual friends, I want to mutually connect, understand them, be understood in return, share hard critique when necessary, hold critique when it's not necessary, etc. Anything less isn't a "friend." I also require alone time just about every day of my life. Things get funky when I don't get any time to myself. The number of personal connections you can sustain like that is low. I don't want or need a huge social network of friends, I am very happy and content with a limited number of deep, quality connections. I honestly think it's probably better not to subject other people to my eccentricities as well.

So what exactly am I missing?

You can make the argument that the failure is other people missing out on what I have to offer... I won't stop you. 😜

I honestly wonder how much I've actually lost. The same repetitive, vague platitudes about "missing out" and "not growing" and similar keep getting repeated... but from my perspective, on taking stock of all things? It seems like very little has materially gone astray.

Energy Output

The second challenge is the misconception that communication should be natural and effortless. While the reality is, it takes effort to communicate and drains energy for everyone. Most speakers and developer advocates (I have been one) often enjoy the calmness when the meeting gets over.

Acute Crashes

It's hard to quantify a self-measured thing like "energy drain" but going just by the words, it's not "enjoying the calmness" after a meeting for me. It's more like feeling like a fleet of busses ran me over, having to stare at a wall doing nothing for an hour before I can even start to decompress, and losing more hours of my day than were logged to the meeting clock. It's only that bad when I have to talk a lot or present to others for a long time, or there is a giant stack of meetings atop one another -- but it is decidedly not an enjoyment of calm.

In one instance, I had a pretty in-depth, heavy conversation about personal trauma with someone I know. It lasted around an hour. I enjoyed that conversation! It was nice to be trusted with their inner thoughts and experiences, and it was good to be an outlet for things they'd been holding onto and dealing with long-term. It was what I'd categorize as a pretty good conversation. And afterward, I spent six hours staring at the nearest wall, locked in, unable to get anything done. That's an extreme example -- the most outlying one I have.

Is that level of "drain" achievable or understandable to a more extroverted type of person? I imagine it's a similar level of deflation and exhaustion as when they've been stuck inside for a month with illness, unable to engage socially.

Chronic Drains

I tried the "fake it till you make it" approach: broadly and consistently forcing more outgoing traits and emulating behaviors for "work success" (especially after getting a job where it was immediately apparent that extroversion is the preferred style).

The resultant "internal vibe check" was something akin to bipolar (please note, this is a metaphorical comparison, I am not literally saying I had a mood disorder).

I'd be able to sustain the effort for a few months, then I'd crash for a few months -- cyclically. Seemed to be about a sustainable three months of each mode. If the social battery metaphor is accurate, it was like I couldn't find the charger. It was a pattern others observed as well, so it was not purely in my head. Kind of wild!

And now I don't do that anymore. My general energy level is more stable, and I'm more certain of where my foundation is. Crazy how being who and what you are is beneficial, huh?

🚫🪤

I'm not trapped in introversion, I'm happy in my lurk-box and I have zero desire to be "broken out of my shell."

I'm frankly not that interested in most other people, particularly in group settings. Given a choice between blankly staring at a wall lost in thought versus the day's fifth iteration of repetitive fill-time smalltalk as other meeting attendees file in... I will pick the first more often than not. It's not hostility, arrogance, or disgust... I'm just indifferent. It's hard to find people I truly like or truly dislike so my motivation for interaction is low.

There's also a bit of reluctance and recalcitrance to share my internal world with most other people, so it flows both ways. I don't think everyone is entitled to my "real authentic self" and I don't see much benefit in sharing that with the general public (could you have guessed from the semi-anonymity and creeping voidmonster? Maybe...).

Extro/introversion isn't just energy drain/gain based on social settings, the original Jungian concept was about where a person's consciousness generally focused:

• Introverted, or inwardly toward one's own world and thoughts.
• Extroverted, toward the external world.

Not necessarily just "social energy" as currently portrayed. My inner world and the things that go on in my own head are just more captivating and engaging than things going on in the outside world.

Actual Growth

The things the original article says are not unique and groundbreaking news, it's quite repetitive bog-standard misunderstanding of introversion. It's very much blasé "growth and social advice" for that arises from the wrong perspective and the wrong place. There is no actual "growth" there.

To understand where I'm coming from: I received quite a lot of messaging through my youth from various sources that the way I preferred to interact with people was wrong. Go make more friends, go be social, put yourself out there in the world, you're holding yourself back. These are pervasive things I was told from many different perspectives.

Essentially I received and internalized the idea that I was somehow wrong, broken, or weird (I totally am weird, but that's another story). I'd dealt with a feeling of living an intensely alien life, always forcing myself to try and enjoy things I really didn't enjoy. I was regularly confused by other people: did they really enjoy these things? Are they just much better at faking it than I am? What's wrong with me that I don't seem to operate like that?

The thing that resulted in actual growth was more or less understanding the difference between introversion and extroversion, the things I actually like, the way I prefer to interact with people, and finding other people who are similar to me. Is everything fixed? No, hardly. But it's much better than it was, and I'm pretty 🆒 with that.

Consequently, the introverts' advantages need to be pointed out—not only to the extraverts but sometimes even to the introverts themselves—for the best-adjusted people are the "psychologically patriotic," who are glad to be what they are. The ablest introverts achieve a fine facility at extraversion, but never try to be extraverts. Through good development of an auxiliary process, they have learned to deal competently with the outer world without pledging any allegiance to it. Their loyalty goes to their own inner principle and derives from it a secure and unshakable orientation to life. (Gifts Differing)