Hacker News Reader

I think often lost from the whole introversion vs extroversion debate is that:

1. It's not a binary. It's a bell curve where many people fit near the middle and some are extreme outliers in either direction.

I know personally that I am an introvert, but I confuse a lot of proclaimed extroverts who mistake me for being extroverted because I have a fairly gregarious and willing to try anything once personality.

2. Introvert / extrovert really has nothing to do with communication skills except that introverts appear to be bad at verbal communication usually because that skill isn't as practiced as extroverts. But good verbal communication is totally a developable skill rather than something innate to a person.

This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems.

At that point, you're not really talking about being an effective engineer, though. You're only talking about being an effective engineer in a large organisation working on a large project.

I know plenty of people in the freelancing and startup world who can build and maintain very significant systems single-handedly. Take someone with the skill and experience to do that, give them a free hand in choosing whatever tools and processes work for them to get a good job done, and remove the overheads of micromanaging this and co-ordinating that. It's not unusual for that person to outperform an entire team working for a competitor under more traditional constraints, or for a small number of such people who can keep the overheads down to outperform a more traditionally organised but mediocre team an order of magnitude larger. Of course these people also need good soft skills, but those are not why they are so productive.

> That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert.

There are many people (including myself) who can operate quite successfully in the text-based world (Slack, email) and collaborate that way.

I think Slack (and other tools like it) helps the introvert be a more active participant or even a leader in certain technical discussions. Most especially, the ones where the servers are melting down.

That's very true! I wasn't really thinking about Slack/etc. when I made that statement. Excellent point.

> That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert.

Yeah, and I realize it's a spectrum and not a binary thing. My point was more:

If we use the simplistic, trendy definition of introversion/extroversion as "do you gain energy having conversations or does it require energy?" and then say that regular conversations are an extremely important part of doing modern development work, I think it's fair to say that you're implicitly selecting for extroverts.

And again, I don't really put a judgement on that. I think it's fair to say "regular conversations are required to be successful as a software developer." I'm just noting the shift (as you've also done!).