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idk who wins, but I'd assume extroverts need a quiet environment to be able to focus as much as anyone else.



Blaming extroverts/introverts is a red herring - it’s down to the nature of the work.

Whether they’re introverts or extroverts a programmer’s job tends to require a lot of solo focus. There’s collaborative aspects of course but it always requires windows of deep work that are deeply frustrated by distraction, introvert or not.

Many other areas of work (including much work in upper management) don’t require that focus. The work is often deeply collaborative and communicative, and it‘s work that can be dropped and picked up on a dime and iterated on without much loss of productivity. In a way it’s work that actively benefits from a “distracting” environment, because it’s often full of rapid-fire blockers best resolved by grabbing someone nearby.

The friction comes from the fact that the people who do either type of work don’t understand the other type if their whole career has only involved one type.


Most programmers understand the aspects of upper management work you described in my experience. And most upper managers choose to work in separate offices.


I wonder why...


Not if they have people facing roles. In that case their job IS talking to other people. Sure, they need to prepare, but the higher up they are, the more of that preparation is done by assistants.


The extroverts are always struggling to get conference room bookings. They'd be able to converse a lot more freely by just inviting people to their always-available offices.




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