Comment by apwell23
2 days ago
also hard on introverts who already get punished in workplaces that promote ppl based on proximity and visiblity.
2 days ago
also hard on introverts who already get punished in workplaces that promote ppl based on proximity and visiblity.
Believe it or not, extroverts also have to develop professional skills, sometimes even things that don't come naturally to them.
No question. Yet, social connection seems worth 10x or 100x competence in any particular circumstance and the effects compound. There are some real benefits from and needs to be prosocial and socially competent but I've regularly seen social competent but technically incompetent people advance far over technically competent but less socially agenda driving people (that are nonetheless socially competent). This only gets worse at scale and as you progress.
I love coding and do it reliably well with joy but as my career has progressed I've struggled more and more with getting a company to let me work at a "low level" or to navigating what seem like sociopathic behaviors to really contribute at my capacity.
What do you mean by 'low level'?
Are you talking about a traditional Staff / Principal engineering role or something different?
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Self advocacy is part of the job.
And just because you’re an introvert doesn’t mean you are incapable of building soft skills. Talking to people is absolutely exhausting for me, but I force myself to do it and practice at it because I know it is important for my career.
Well, they also promote people based on impact and, with rare exceptions, if you're holed up in a corner someplace you're probably not having a huge amount of impact.
Reality is that the ones quietly holed up in the corner are usually doing all the unsexy maintenance-type work that the extroverts don't want to do (because it's not sexy).
Nobody cares about that work... until it doesn't get done. And so, nobody doing it gets promoted.
Communicating the importance of your work is a professional skill.
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Or it gets outsourced which is what often happens.
If it was all about impact then ppl wouldn't be paying thousands of dollars to learn to play golf with their bosses. But you knew that already.
Is closing deals on the golf course even still a thing these days? I suppose it probably is in some circles but I haven't seen it in a couple of decades of tech industry life when it was more likely to be fun runs or skiing.
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As one, I have to say there's really nothing about being an introvert that prevents one from being affable and available. The idea is that human interaction does not boost the introvert's energy the way it does the extrovert's, not that it's impossible.
Dealing with people and communication can be learned.
I get it. By nature I was very much an introvert except for certain scenarios when I was in my comfort zone until at least my mid 30s. I was an only child, the stereotypical short, fat kid with a computer growing up in the 80s (still short, became a gym rat, part time fitness instructor and only stopped the latter as my other obligations became greater). Horrible dating life and a bad first marriage before turning 35 (happily remarried since then).
It became apparent that to get ahead in my career, “codez real gud” was going to limit my career. I slowly learned how to “act like I like people”.
But you can only add so much value to an organization typing on a keyboard. There is a reason that every single tech company promotes based on “impact”, “scope”, “dealing with ambiguity”. Those all require soft skills.
Well put. I'm an introvert, I can't do math, I won't travel, etc. are all things that some people claim as if it's the unchangeable nature of things. If that's their chosen path, so be it. But they should understand it will probably be pretty limiting because the world they live in.
Yes they are unchangeable. I've tried many many times to break out of it; it works for a while but i revert back to my base behavior.
We know what kinds of temperament a dog has within few months of it being a puppy ( and who the puppy's parents are). Why would it be different for humans.
Claim that Our temperaments ( and our likes/dislikes for travel) are all learnt is a bizzare blank slate claim that doesn't track with my life experience and what i've seen in the world.
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> But you can only add so much value to an organization typing on a keyboard.
In my understanding, non-junior software development jobs never were about typing on the keyboard. Senior software engineer is a fancy name for a problem solver, and code is just a specialized tool they can build to possibly achieve the goal. It always was about talking to stakeholders, figuring out what the heck they actually want today, how it fits with what they think they want tomorrow, learning more about those stakeholders so you can guess what they will think they want next week. Only then it's thinking about it all it for a while, and only after that it's getting to press the actual buttons.
But I'm not sure those things require "soft skills" aka - in my understanding - being a people person. For me, it was a very simple learning process - I (as a junior) coded something, a manager came next month and said I have to rewrite everything again because things have changed. I hated it, so I started to think how to possibly avoid or minimize it and optimize my own processes.
And in my mental model, it's not about people (save for tiny companies where a whole department/role is a single person, so I have to account for their mental chaos monkeys), it's all about business. That's why I wrote "stakeholders", intentionally dehumanizing (with no negative connotations) the model.
Thinking about engineering leads I know who aren't about leading huge teams, it's still about mentoring, talking to people, making connections, often talking to external audiences, etc.
I think a lot of that is "soft skills." Maybe not becoming a stereotypical sales person. But it's also not don't ever bug me and let me code.
The way that most tech companies define levels - yes I’m simplifying slightly. I’ll provide citations:
Junior - you are told what to do (business objective) and how to do it (technical).
Mid - you are told what to do (business objective). But you are expected to use your experience to figure out the “how”. You should be able to lead a decently complicated feature/epic/work stream either by yourself or with others and mentoring other juniors.
Senior - You are expected to lead major projects that involve multiple epics with multiple developers, talk to “the business”, disambiguate, deal with XYProblems, communicate trade offs between time, cost, meeting requirements, etc. Now you also start having to deal with cross team coordination.
Staff - cross team impact, dealing much more with business strategy and setting technical direction.
As an IC, the only things you have at your disposal are your relationships and reputation. Both require soft skills.
Leveling guidelines:
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/