Caring for your extravert

As an introvert, I really appreciate The Atlantic’s Caring for Your Introvert.  However some statements make me a bit uneasy.  Like this one:

 Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways.

I don’t think that’s true at all.  I think that introverts misunderstand extraverts as much as extraverts misunderstand them.  As Jung said (quoting from Psychological Types):

Just as the introvert who tries to get hold of the nature of extravert invariably goes wide off the mark, so the extravert who tries to understand the other’s inner life from the standpoint of externality is equally at sea.

You see, extraverts have difficulty understanding introverts because they’re always thinking of them in extraverted terms.  But it goes both ways.  Introverts are constantly analyzing extraverts in introverted terms.

So how do extraverts work? In her book Personality Type: an Owner’s Manual, Lenore Thomson (an introvert) tells a story about how she used to conduct lectures on type. She’d give out a personality test, then pass around type descriptions and invite the students to comment. The introverts in the class would get excited and ask a lot of questions. The extraverts wouldn’t say anything at all. However, all of the extraverts would approach her after class to ask if the type description seemed accurate.

The introverts in the room were happy to take a test, read a description, and come to a conclusion. The extraverts needed an external point of reference to form their conclusions. This is what you constantly see among extraverts. In fact (since the majority of these classes are usually introverted), if she gave the same test again two or three classes later, the extraverts would score evenly between being introverts and extraverts.

This is why extraverts can get so cranky with introverts who don’t talk much. They don’t give the extravert a point of reference to work from.

Another characteristic of extraverts is that they’re constantly aiming for things they see as being bigger than the Individual. For programmers, we can see this by looking at Paul Graham’s essay on great hackers, albeit from a very introverted standpoint:

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view languages as standards. They don’t want to bet the company on Betamax.

Graham was probably referring to extraverts when he talked about “business types”. After all, I know plenty of geeks who have the same attitude. Here’s the point that Graham is trying to make: great hackers like good languages. Therefore businesses should use good languages to attract great hackers. Extraverts see things a bit differently though. They understand that programmers won’t always want to use the most popular language. And it isn’t that that isn’t important to them. It’s just that they’re putting the needs of the greater organization ahead of the needs of its individual workers.

Introverts might see this behavior as being controlling, and indeed that might even be the case if the extravert sees their behavior as undermining the greater good. But the reality of the situation is that the extravert is putting both their own and the introvert’s needs behind that of the larger whole.

In this case, the extravert would do well to listen to Graham (Graham could also learn something from the extravert, but this is about understanding extraversion). An organization can’t meet it’s goals if it doesn’t have the support of the individuals that work for it. At the same time, one has to admire the extraverted attitude. I’ve seen extraverted hackers put aside their personal desires to choose tools that benefit the organization more than themselves, even if they strongly hate that tool.

One thing that should be noted here: I speak in terms of absolutes (“extraverts do this”, “introverts do that”), but this is bit of an oversimplification. Everyone has an introverted and extraverted side to them, and you might occasionally see introverted behavior from extraverts. Generally speaking, one side is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t learn to tap into their other side.

Here are a few things an introvert might do to better get along with an extravert:

  1. Phrase things in terms of what the benefit is to the greater organization if possible.
  2. Be assertive. It’s good to learn to get along with extraverts, but do so in such a way that you can still be true to yourself.
  3. Remember, if an extravert is constantly interrupting you to get your thoughts, it means they respect your opinion. Be polite and try to find a way to help them in such a way that they don’t have to interrupt you.

Heroes and Villians, or electrons and duct tape don't mix

One of Carl Jung’s great contributions to the field of psychology is the idea of the archetype.  There is a boatload of psychology books on this subject out there if you have a lot of free time to spend deciphering psychological jargon or just happen to also have a PhD in psychology (in which case this blog post wouldn’t be useful to you anyway).  Here’s the thing though:  you already know what an archetype is.  You just haven’t put a name to it.

Think of the characters that are in every story.  There’s always a hero and a villain.  They also have a supporting cast of other characters.  You have the parent (metaphorically speaking – they don’t have to be someone’s actual parent), a good natured mentor who protects people (think Obi-Wan from Star Wars).  Then there’s the senex:  the wise man who treats his proteges like crap because that’s the only way to learn (think of the sensei in any martial arts movie).  You’ve also got the Puer, the good natured, innocent child-like character (just about every role Adam Sandler plays).  And there’s also the trickster:  the child-like character who causes trouble (Kevin from Home Alone). These are all archetypes.

Not only do we see these characters in fiction, but we also see them in real life too.  Here’s where things get interesting though.  We all share these archetypes, but we put different people in each role. Your hero might be my senex.   Your puer might be my villain.

The reason?  We place people in the role of these archetypes based on ourselves, not other people.  You might feel that a part of your personality is particularly child-like and associate it with the puer when you see it in other people.  Seeing through this illusion can be difficult.  However, it’s usually very liberating to see through this.  While others are always looking for heroes and villains and such, you get a chance to see people as they actually are.

It’s no coincidence that each of these archetypes has a “good” and “bad” version, either.  The “good” version is usually more conscious. The “bad” version usually comes from the unconscious.

It might be easiest to see this with an example. Compare Joel Spolsky’s blog post about Duct Tape programmers to Michael Lopp’s essay on Free Electron programmers.

Ostensibly, these programmers are both really productive. But the similarity ends there. Spolsky’s Duct Tape programmer is someone who doesn’t go with the latest fad. They’d rather just get things done than spend their time worrying about what’s fashionable. They also don’t spend too much time worrying about making their code perfect because they want to ship. Lopp’s Free Electron programmer on the other hand “defines the bleeding edge”. They can get things done, but you have to be careful. They’ll rewrite your database layer from scratch for that .1 release.

What’s most interesting is that they both refer to the same person (unless Lopp means someone else when he mentions Netscape’s Free Electron — UPDATE: apparently he did, jwz claims to not be able to ride a unicycle). Now Lopp actually worked with Zawinski so his version might be more accurate, but I suspect that both are projecting themselves onto him at some level.

In other words, these kinds of writings tell us more about the author than they tell us about what makes a programmer good. This is what we do when we talk about our Hero: emphasize its strengths while we gloss over its weaknesses. This makes sense if you realize that the Hero essentially represents our ego. Any attack to the Hero is an attack on the ego.