Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

I am an extrovert. I had a corporate job for over five years. During that time, I was too sick to glad-hand everyone I met like I might have done in my twenties.

For this reason, I did a lot of communicating via email. I felt like I wasn't doing as well as the more extroverted types who were more obviously able to suck up to our immediate superiors.

Then me and some of my teammates were moved to a new team. My very professional and established track record of sending emails most of the time meant my questions were still getting the answer I needed. The seemingly successful extroverts were incredibly frustrated and tearing their hair out. They didn't know how to function in the new conditions. They began turning to me for advice on how to get things done on the new team, physically separated from the people they had established relationships with.

Learn to play to your strengths. Being an extrovert isn't necessarily all it is cracked up to be. Most of those so-called friendships are more shallow than you think.

If you can find a nice and sympathetic extrovert, they may be able to do some introductions and the like for you and bring down your stress levels. I did that sort of thing sometimes for a painfully shy teammate. But, beyond that, don't believe too much of the hype.

Great advice ^_^ Non-direct contact helps me a bunch!

Thank you, this advice means a lot. Email is something I never thought of and I definitely plan on doing more of it from now on.

I'm going to warn against it. Overdependence on email has hurt my career on several occasions. Most people hate reading work emails and they will resent you for making them do it (read: they usually won't do it at all; at best, expect them to skim). The best work emails are short -- and I mean short, like two sentences short.

Email can be a useful tool and learning to communicate over a distance is really important, but I can't help but think you're going to hurt yourself if you see email as a substitute for face-to-face.

Unfortunately there are places where technical incompetence let email being almost completely replaced by social networks, which are a curse even for moderate introverts like me, not counting their implicit huge security problems when used for work related communications.

There are times when face-to-face really matters and I did tell that to my frustrated coworkers. But their heavy reliance on face-to-face broke when things changed. So, it isn't inherently better in all ways, for all things.

I did make sure to get with someone in person (with a printed version of the files I was working on) for certain thorny issues. But if you communicate well and succinctly via email, about 90%-95% of routine stuff at my job that required input from one of my superiors could be effectively handled by email. This eliminated the need to try to arrange face-to-face time, which can be logistically challenging when you both have busy schedules and deadlines.

This was a big stress point for coworkers of mine who learned the hard way that, no, your boss that you are squeeing at all the time is not actually your friend. I cultivated a professional relationship with my superiors. I was not able to squee at them and suck up and blather on. I was too sick to do all that stuff.

They didn't need to like me. They did need to respect my competence, answer my work related questions and sign off on things above my pay grade that required authorization. I was still getting that after the new team was formed and lacked a dedicated lead, so everyone was still required to seek certain things from our old lead, whomever that happened to be, until they could free up resources and assign a lead to the team. Other people were tearing their hair out.

Email does not work for everything. But if you learn to communicate well via email, for many things, it is actually superior to face time because you have a written record of your boss's authorization, professional opinion or the resource they directed you to. It isn't your word against theirs if something goes wrong. There is a paper trail. If you, in fact, did as you were told and it was the wrong thing, they go after your boss, not you. If they told you verbally and are not some kind of paladin-like being, the odds are high that you and they will "remember" it differently and you are the one that will take the fall.

I agree to an extent. It's definitely beneficial to get a paper trail when you can. However, bosses know about the radioactive nature of email and actively avoid creating a trail for anything they're not willing to get on paper. It's also useful to know how to write an email that will get a task done and move things along.

However, I have to disagree 1000% on it not mattering if someone "likes" you. It matters a great deal. Of course, being an obvious brownnoser is contemptible. But being well-liked is the most important task of any and every employee. When push comes to shove, it's going to be easier for them to overlook your professional inadequacies than it will be to overlook their personal affectations.

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