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Comment by potatoman22 | Hacker News Reader

Telling people about your idea is not a social game.

Getting people to listen to your idea if they're not seeking it out is 100% a social game. Getting in the room is a social game. If you value the opinions of your introverts, ask them.

>If you value the opinions of your introverts, ask them.

This may be an uncharitable reading of what you said, but you're implying that introverts are special fragile people who can't be bothered to share their brilliant ideas.

If someone comes up with an idea, and they think it's a good idea, it's their responsibility to advocate for it. They're already that idea's #1 fan. They're uniquely motivated to get it out in the world. How can they get others to take them seriously when they can't even take the initiative to share it themselves?

Sure, maybe some people are true solitary geniuses. But that's a waste of genius if they can't effectively communicate their thoughts with other humans.

There's a whole range of soliciting information that goes from "Beat the information out of them" to "Ask a person individually" to "Ask people as group" to "Allow information to be given" to "Discourage people from telling you things" to "Yell at people who talk to you without you asking them first".

Depending on your approach, you'll get differing amounts of information from different people. A more charitable reading of the post you replied to might be: You shouldn't be content getting information only from those who like to talk and volunteer information.

Speaking as an introvert, that's certainly not my intent. But if the only way to share ideas is to do things that make me miserable, and the people who need to listen my ideas made it that way, they're clearly not interested. In most cases I have better things to do than fight uphill or shout into a void. It's probably a lot of stress for no benefit.

Ed: incidentally, suggestion boxes (mentioned nearby in the thread) are also probably not helpful. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, I assume those are ignored and don't bother.

This reminds me that most of the things people call "introversion" on the internet are actually signs of high neuroticism.

Some people, it seems, mistake "introversion" for "lack of social skills". The former is a personality trait (I'm more of an introvert myself). The latter can be trained.

This has not been my experience. Introverts or Extroverts has nothing to do with whether someone will champion an idea. That’s a doer / talker distinction.

You have to be effective in managing people. Maybe some people like to socialize an idea in their in group before they find someone to champion it. Maybe others like to write up their thoughts and share the doc on chat. Maybe others like to whiteboard it out after talking to someone at the bar.

But all of them actively push change.

Right, at least for some people. Still, a lot of environments don't really support all those options for pushing change. If you're running an organization, you're hamstringing yourself if the ways to push ideas that introverts find natural are dead ends in practice.

So in a world full of introverts no ideas would ever be shared?

That's like dismissing programming as "computer game". It's not a "game" if it's how the real work gets done.

Programming is one component of how the “real work” gets done, yes. There is plenty of very real work that happens before and after the developer writes code.

That being said, developers are in a very unique position because they are the ones who actually build the product. If you can’t sell your devs on an idea, it ain’t getting built.

The actual saying what your idea is? No.

The process of getting to saying what your idea is? Frequently, especially if it is very informal or reliant on social cred to get into the room.

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