Did extroverts ruin remote work for the rest of us? | Hacker News Reader

Did extroverts ruin remote work for the rest of us?

makeworkbetter.substack.com

40 pointsrustoo31 comments

The older I've gotten, the less I find the introvert/extrovert deliniation useful. It's a characterization that brings a ton of assumptions to it, especially when employed in a Myers-Briggs-like fashion like this article is. A better headline would be "Did people who don't like remote work ruin remote work for the rest of us?" But that's practically a tautology. When you step away from that, this article is really just a rant about meeting culture.

Different companies have different ways of getting things done to build concensus, and some are more compatible with remote work than others. The fact that you see so many different ways of doing things implies that they're all valid and relatively efficient. That's why most large companies that went remote during the pandemic are returning to their old ways. Two years isn't enough time to shift that culture.

Spot on.

The article rants, for example, that extrovert behaviours tend to be extrapolated to leadership skills. I think perhaps instead, leadership requires basic people skills which come naturally to “extroverts”. Being able to look someone in the eye instead of their navel (or worse) is a basic requirement.

But beyond that people skills are skills that most people can learn and be successful leaders.

I’d go as far as say, with experienced managers, it can be hard to tell if they are introverts or extroverts. They are good at directing teams using a variety of means of communication, during paid hours. Not bubbly chatterboxes or addicted to WoW or whatever cliche you want to use.

“Being able to look someone in the eye instead of their navel” is a crude caricature of introversion. It’s exactly the sort of misconception that causes people to assume introversion is a negative trait.

Myers briggs is unhelpful and unscientific. The Big Five inventory, is the opposite.

When applied correctly; otherwise it's just words. If you're using introversion or extroversion as a stand-in for "likes remote work" and "doesn't like remote work," then I find it neither helpful nor scientific.

>> When it comes to deciding how plans will unfold or the way that organisations will run, true to form, the extroverts speak up and call the shots.

This is absolutely nothing to do with introversion. Introverts can, and should, assert themselves. I say this as quite an extreme introvert. Being an introvert is separate from being weak/quiet/unassertive. Mixing the concepts is almost insulting.

I think there are a few types of people who want to go back to the office (and it’s nothing to do with introverts/extroverts):

1. People who think working from home during the pandemic == normal remote work.

2. People who like to be around others when they work but don’t want to put the effort in to find a co working space they could work from and new work friends.

3. People who have no social life outside of work and have come to consider their colleagues their close/only friends (even if their colleagues don’t see it the same way).

4. people who realized that _some_ work can be done more effectively face-to-face. (and please note: this is true the other way around as well)

There are obvious examples (care work) and a whole lot of grey in between the extremes.

One of the problems I noticed in this endless discussion is that people really seem to have a hard time imagining that other people might have just very different jobs and that companies typically have a wide range of jobs. More challenging, people tend to have several hats and like some of these hats more than others

Remote work isn't ruined, first of all.

The power of remote work is unlocked by working asynchronously with many folks at a time, each of whom can choose for themselves when to focus and when to interact. This is lost on people who insist on using Zoom et al to simulate the synchronous in-person experience.

Blocking "focus time" space on your calendar is the best way to push back on Zoom culture, and is both rational and easy to defend the business value of.

I ask the engineers on my team to aim for two full days a week of focus time (Tue and Thu seems to be working) and at least one 3 hour block on each of the remaining days (in whatever part of the day overlaps least with the rest of the team timezone-wise). We miss this for incidents or voluntary hacking together, but n for required/ritual meetings.

Also, I guess I took the clickbait, but stop it: extroverts as a category didn't do any purposeful harm to introverts as a category, and certainly didn't ruin anything for them. Play to your strengths and GLHF!

+1 for blocking focus time in your calendar. Added bonus: you look busy to those who think you are only working hard when you have a booked calendar ;)

Btw I consider myself a bit of an extrovert and I feel slightly offended by this article. I love you introverts and I apologize for any harm “we” caused.

I feel like you missed the point. If remote work is unavailable then there are no zoom meetings. As far as working asynchronously, that can happen remotely or in the office.

Well, not just the extroverts. We can’t ignore the people who define their lives (social, choice of home location, etc) around work. People like that who don’t have much of a life outside work are just as big of an influence in ruining remote work for those of us who don’t define our lives by the workplace.

> 'Shall we jump on a call?’ someone said to me last week

Yeah, the answer is no. Make an effort and try to articulate what you're trying to say by text. Make an effort

I certainly won't give my time to something that can be clearly explainable by text (and no, your difficulty in doing that is not my problem)

"never ask a quick question by email when an hour long meeting with 6 people will do"

I think about 50% of my meetings and hence maybe 20% of my salary are to satisfy perceptions of social etiquette and / or to hack around equitable allocation of time / priority / resources.

Haha, replace every instance of text with voice and you have my preference, I hate long back-and-Forths over e-mail when things can be settled with a quick call.

Yeah for things where you need to, let's say, schedule an appointment, or where there are a lot of yes/no questions back and fourth I agree

But most of the time I see people wanting to "jump on a call" for something that's one or two simple questions

Sure, it is also on both parts to make this work efficiently, like, if you're not synchronous, don't answer things with just yes/no, but give more detal

Often, that's not even being extroverted, that's being lazy and valuing your time more than anyone else's.

If I had a penny for every time I say "please check the channel topic and link bar it's in there" I could quit work.

The worst of all is people who ask extremely obvious questions. If you use GitHub Enterprise with SAML, you need to "authorize" every PAT and SSH key you use to pull enterprise repos. If you don't, GitHub will even tell you right on the command line that you need to do this and adds a link to authorize that particular credential. And yet not a month goes by that someone will paste the full message with the link to their solution and complain that their GitHub account doesn't work. Preferably with a team mention so you pull everyone out of focus because you were too lazy to actually read the error message.

I really wish some tools like Slack put more work into enabling and, to some degree, enforcing asyncronous communication.

I think this is very contextual. I sometimes find a minute or two calls to resolve matters more efficient when accompanied by a mail right afterwards. Rather than going back and forth on a mail itself. Of course, at other times, when topic is nuanced, mail back and forth becomes a necessity.

I'm an introverted person who used to want to do everything by e-mail, but have eventually come to agree with the usefulness of interactive communication to discuss certain types of issues. In particular, the ability to share screens via Zoom has made it a lot easier to quickly show someone a lot more context than is possible with e-mail.

However, if a question can be easily resolved with a single e-mail, I much prefer that to being interrupted by a call or Slack message.

I feel like the article focuses on the wrong things. Before, it was difficult for introverts to be included in critical decisions. Now, getting into the meeting and being heard is easy, albeit a bit uncomfortable. But overall, I strongly believe that moving meetings to zoom has empowered those people that feel shy in person.

Honestly i don't think extro intro is useful i believe that it's more verbal vs written communicators, read some Drucker for more info.

But yet we'll just find that there is not one size fits all and what will be great for one is not so great for another.

Hmm I think I’m considered an extrovert, but isn’t this a spectrum? Anyway I also hate too many meetings and I need the makers schedule at least a couple of days a week. Fortunately I can just pass on many meetings and nobody cares, as long as I am there occasionally and get stuff done.

I don't think I am an extrovert and I am incredibly happy being back in the office.

what do you like about it?

Presumably, one or more things.

Betteridge's law says no.

Not hard to see how this rubbish is top of the site when we’re flagging interesting technical articles off the site.

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