It is our unfortunate shared lot in life that we chose a profession most suited to introverted people. For some reason when I say the word introvert people get offended. I find these are these types of people are my favorite people to be around. In particular I found that they have a superpower: they can just sit there in front of a screen for absolutely hours if not days without talking to anybody and just get things done and not have to take a break to talk to somebody. When they do want to talk to you, they seem very pleasant.

My father is such a person. I wanted to be just like him so I chose his career more or less (I'm DevOps; he's a DBA). It wasn't until later that I realized I was at a disadvantage because of my extroversion relative to my peers until I landed at my previous company. The culture there was very heads-down. I had to build in other social interactions in my day in order to survive.

If you thought your friends were bad, Hacker News is 10 times worse. Another great superpower of introverts is that they tend to be excellent writers. They love writing because it turns communication, a pleasant but otherwise taxing activity, into concentration work in isolation, which is something that lends them energy. All the while being able to feel like they are connected to their peers. Meanwhile, extroverts feel more disconnected when writing by comparison. Rather than write a long email, we generally would much rather just walk over and talk to someone. For these reasons, text based communication comment boards like Hacker News are disproportionately representative of my more introverted colleagues.

I lucked out because I'm a devops engineer, which requires the ability to code and do IT but it's also really central to several teams and so requires lots of communication. So that aspect helps me get through the long hours of coding. Coding is something I enjoy, but it's a bit like scuba diving for me. I'm having fun down on the coral reef floor but every once in awhile I just have to surface and fill my tank up.

I am squarely in the crowd that wants everyone back at the office. Yes, this is not fair to those who want to stay at home, but for me it's not worth going into the office if it's just me and two other people when everyone else is still home. Fortunately at my new company there's more social interaction and there's nine people instead of two. But again, it's not useful to me who needs social interaction to go so far to an office with nobody in it. I don't care about the actual office space, I care about talking to people. Maybe that's not fair to you dear reader. I understand that. But it is what it is.

I'm hoping that the recession will kick in harder than it is now and allow the managers to start requiring people to come back in. Those who threaten to quit will make the manager's lives easier so that they don't have to lay people off. This is sort of happening at Facebook right now.

Whether a manager is an introvert or extrovert, their job is communication. It's been shown by Microsoft studies that their workloads of doubled in the pandemic even though most people's have stayed the same. This incentive to get their employees back in the office together with a recession will probably put things back to where they were eventually.

That said, I realize the cat is out of the bag. Remote work works and people know it now. Some companies have gone the opposite direction, getting rid of their office entirely. As long as there are other companies that get people back together I'll be okay.