It’s clear to me that the author is introverted as in shy, not introverted as in neurodivergent; there are so many “why don’t you just ____?” and maybe there’s an audience who hasn’t tried that and would adjust well to the advice, but I’m definitely not in that audience.
My advice to anyone who feels the same way: let yourself shine, make the social connections that feel comfortable for you, and… hopefully you’ll have the same privilege I have in being able to stand out just by being your awesome self. The job market is competing for you, not the other way around.
If you're a painfully shy person, you've probably had the experience when you were young where someone asked you "Why are you so quiet?" and you had no answer for that so you just wanted to die on the spot. That's kind of what this article is like.
I get how to socialize, I just know I'm bad at it, which causes anxiety, which compounds the problem.
I've managed to survive as a developer like this. Like you say, let yourself shine. If you do good work, people will notice, and eventually that will lead to meaningful connections. You have to get out of your comfort zone sometimes, but you don't have to become an extrovert.
Pretty much this. I (ADHD and autistic) have a different negative reaction to social promotion than people who are uncomfortable being social but can benefit from some coaching to make it more comfortable. I’ve been inundated with this guidance my whole life and if anything it’s only more stressful to be treated as if I haven’t.
The difference for me is that I experience social anxiety differently than I experience being inherently a socially square peg in a round hole. A large part of my social experience is that people expect me to be a different person than I am and behave in a different way than I feel comfortable. That’s a very different feeling from how I experience social anxiety or otherwise feel shy. It’s essentially a performance, often called masking, and I have a different (quite a bit less usually) capacity for it than I do all of the challenges of being socially engaged when I’d rather not for my own space.
This is exactly it. If you drugged me, put me on a plane, and made me parachute into a random social situation while still groggy, I'd do great. I just feel no particular inclination to socialize. I recognize it's not great for personal and professional development, so I push through the indifference anyway, but my idea of a good time is wandering through some quiet old place with a camera.
I live with it every day and I’m pretty good with the balance I’ve struck. But no it’s not just social anxiety, it’s a constant pressure to be a person I’m not.
The other side of that coin is that you see other people - extroverts, people-people like managers, recruiters and marketeers, and think of them as masking, of putting on a face and an act to achieve their goals. And it's offputting, it puts my hackles and defenses up, and/or makes me put on a somewhat different mask to try and interact with them (if I have to).
But as someone else pointed out, long term it mellows out a bit; you stop caring, you surround yourself with similar people, you become confident in your abilities, and I guess the masking, where needed, becomes easier, less draining, or even becomes part of who you are.
Small side remark, ABL or ABA or whatever, is a conversion therapy aimed at autistic people (and children) that's basically forcing them to mask, forcing them to pretend to be neurotypical. Think Pavlovian punishments for stimming and the like. Don't support those.
If it's of any consolation then that pressure goes down with age. After you're 35+ and have kids then nobody expects you to be as social (it at all) anymore. It took me 40 something years to come to terms with that no, I'm not like other people and I'll never be. Now I'm confident in my social solitude, it's who I am, take it or leave it. I'm good with putting on a mask for social occasions though if I need to. But I have the freedom not to.
I also regret that in my youth it didn't occur to me to respond to "Why are you so quiet?" with "Why are you so loud?"
I'm a really quiet person. As far as I know, I'm not neurodivergent and would generally be "In normal range". But anxiety isn't really part of it. I mean, of course I get anxious, but that goes away over time.
For example: For a while, I worked in a school cafeteria. I generally helped prep, ran the cash register while talking to the children, and afterwards spent time in the dish room. Nothing special. During the summer, I went to different schools (with a group) to clean classrooms. I talked more during the summer, simply because the job duties made it fairly easy to do while working.
"I've worked with her for months, and this is the most I've heard her talk"
"Really? She's still pretty quiet!"
This wasn't anxiety, I just didn't talk much. And this has just been a theme of my life. I'm married to someone who might even have less need for social interaction than I do, and they sometimes remind me to speak up. It just is.
And I've never really felt like it was something that I should get over. Perhaps I've "Learned to live with it", but it really isn't like that because I don't really have an issue with it and it usually doesn't cause issues.
It's true, especially in software. That's why salaries/TC are going through the roof. This is also why it is fair to expect developers/engineers to push back on unethical practices -- we have a lot more power than a lot of us think.
My advice to anyone who feels the same way: let yourself shine, make the social connections that feel comfortable for you, and… hopefully you’ll have the same privilege I have in being able to stand out just by being your awesome self. The job market is competing for you, not the other way around.