So I just got rejected for a job for being too introverted.

They were very impressed with my advanced and broad technical knowledge but they said I'm "too introverted to hang out with cool, young people". That's ageism and that's illegal. Anyway.

I have more knowledge than most senior specialist devs (I've worked with them and I know them) but just because I'm a reserved and thinking person, I'm not welcome in this society of idiots and I don't get a job.

Two words: fuck society.

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

Annual performance peer review

Person who did review me wrote in the section “skills needed to improve”:

“He is introverted...”

Bloody hell!! What a big problem :) and how in earth you can “fix” it? And why everyone expected to be extraverted??

devRant is going to change the stereotype of introverted programmers. Clearly we are not! We just need the right people to talk to :)

Now, I am very shy and introverted.
I have always been that way.
I really hate having to socialize.
I've recently forced myself to talk more to people and it seems to work pretty well.
I may still love my computer more, but slowly I am getting better.

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

Can someone explain to me why the fuck I should even care about the fact, that some companies collect, use and sell my data? I'm not famous, I'm not a politician and I'm not a criminal, I think most of us aren't and won't ever be. We aren't important. So what is this whole bullshittery all about? I seriously don't get it and I find it somewhat weird that especially tech guys and IT "experts" in the media constantly just make up these overly creepy scenarios about big unsafe data collecting companies "stealing" your "private" information. Welcome to the internet, now get the fuck over it or just don't be online. It's your choice, not their's.

I honestly think, some of these "security" companies and "experts" are just making this whole thing bigger than it actually is, because it's a damn good selling point. You can tell people that your app is safe and they'll believe you and buy your shit app because they don't understand and don't care what "safe" or "unsafe" means in this context. They just want to be secure against these "evil monster" companies. The same companies, which you portrayed them as "evil" and "unfair" and "mean" and "unrepentant" for over a decade now.

Just stop it now. All your crappy new "secure" messenger apps have failed awesomely. Delete your life now, please. This isn't about net neutrality or safety on the internet. This is all about you, permanently exaggerating about security and permanently training people to be introverted paranoid egoistic shit people so that they buy your elitist bullshit software.

Sorry for my low english skills, but please stop to exist, thank you.

!(!rant)

So I wanted a raise and the only way was becoming a software lead.

With that title you get more money but also more responsibility, so you have the last word in technical decisions, you review architecture, do tech interviews, guide the less experienced, etc. I can handle that, even as introverted as I am.

What nobody told me was that I was going to spend my whole time on fucking meetings, one after another, I have not touched my IDE in days, I hate this shit already.

Careful what you wish for they say, so true, I'm stuck here and I hate my job now, probably going to quit as soon as I recover my life, if ever.

Am I the only one who hates meet-ups and networking events? We were supposed to be introverted geeks!

Here's how I imagine my bad start on a new job would be:

1. Being introverted
2. Being introverted
3. Being introverted

Yep, I'm awkward most of the times in most social interactions irl outside of my friend circle.

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

Startup company: "We love competing with each other! We (the sales team) play pranks and pass each other mini footballs! Mandatory team social nights (No we won't pay you for it)!

Me, a typical introverted dev: "HISSSSSSSSSSS, away, away!"

What's with these sales people making software companies reminiscent of 1980s Wall Street trading floors?

Tldr; its a long introduction

Hi Ranters,

I've been on this app for quite a while now. As a shy cat watching from a distance and reading all kinds of rants. Anywho I feel comfortable enough to crawl out of my shell and introduce myself. Since I feel you guys together made such a pleasant and safe community, I'm really happy to be a part of it!

Anyway I'm Sam, 24 year old, from the Netherlands. My favorite color is green. Mostly the green you can find in nature. The one that calms you down:). I'm a very introverted person but always very curious and eager to learn new things.

I started to program when I was 12. I did assembly and C++. Because I liked making cheats for online games. Later I learned about C#, Java and Python. Mostly used it for web stuff, scraping, services etc. But also chatbots (for Skype for example).

Currently I'm 2 years in as a data scientist, mostly working in Python.

But on the side as a hobby and with an ambition I have a basic understanding of full stack development.
Mostly Nodejs, express, mongo, and frontend, no frameworks.

(I will later ask you guys some more questions about that! I could really use some advice!)

Anyway enough about me! Tell a bit about yourselves! Happy to get to know you all a little better!

Hey there! -first rant-

I need your advice mighty ranters.. I'm an introverted gal studying Computer Science at uni, and i love this field. Wanna be a web or app developer..

I need your help about 2 things:

1. Literally ANY advice, or things you wish you knew, when you were a rookie

2. I'm currently living in solitude, because of hard times in the past and i find making friends much more difficult at uni than in high school. It even starts to affect my productivity in a bad way. I have a hard time trusting people.
So any advice about this? How do you cope with too much solitude? Is there maybe a group for girl programmers? I don't know..

All advice are welcomed! (and IT jokes too, to make my day :D )
Thanks a lot !

Ps.: You are great! Awesome community.

Just declined a small internship to work at NASA because I feel like I’m too introverted and incapable of doing it (knowledge wise).

It was a unexpected offer in person and I wasn’t prepared for it, so instead of saying “I’ll let you know” I outright declined it.

Feeling extraordinarily defeated over my answer. Any hope of recovering from the situation? It might seem like a simple task to call the guy and let him know I changed my mind, but the thought of doing so seems extremely scary for me.

As a side note, he is a family “friend” and a customer of the business I currently work at (where he offered it to me) (unrelated field of work)

I want to talk about my last six months at work. Who wants to hear it?
Spoiler alert : from introverted nerd to Talkative flirt
What did it cost? Everything.

Twice a year, my work throws a party to celebrate our successes. Think of this as a post-Christmas and post-tax season party. Usually it’s a simple affair – they hire out a room in a bar, we have a theme to dress up to (last year for tax it was green, the colour of money), and it’s a social gathering. No pressure to participate, theme was broad enough that everyone could participate, and everyone came along for as long as they wanted.

This year, they’ve decided to make our post-tax party at a karaoke bar. I am usually a fan of karaoke…with my friends, after a drink or five, on my own terms. But singing in front of work colleagues?

To make things worse, they’ve created a committee to hyper-organise the games and teams. I know the usual AAM stance on organised/forced fun, and I attempted to get on the committee in an effort to steer them towards voluntary participation, but I was told the committee was full.

The party is next week and I’m already feeling panicky. We have been allocated into teams. We’ve been assured that these weren’t random, but were purposefully chosen to ensure a mix of outgoing and introverted people. Lovely. On top of being forced to participate, I have to sing with team members I normally wouldn’t spend time with. I’d be happy to do karaoke in front of my colleagues if it was a relaxed, opt-in thing where anyone who wanted to just jumped up there, but the forced, organised activity with judging and prizing is just making me dread it.

And there will be awards, which means there will be judging. I’ve alreasdy spoken up once after hearing a committee member excitedly tell a friend “there will even be an award for worst singer!” I straight up told her that there was no way they could have that as an award after forcing people to participate. I told I was being a party pooper and that it was all in good fun.

The official teams and rules were sent out yesterday and I noticed the award is actually for “best strangling of cat sound-a-like.” Which is infinitely worse.

How do I get through this party without ruffling any feathers, but also not putting myself and my singing abilities up for scrutiny in front of everyone I work with? Short of throwing a tantrum or sitting at the party in a corner and sulking, I’m not sure how to handle this diplomatically. The only people who aren’t going are those who have leave planned. They’ve even scheduled it so that it is running from 3 pm-6.30 pm (so, as my boss explained, those with childcare can still come for a few hours and not have to get a babysitter).

I wanted to be a Software Engineer 😊 i bought a book but not reading it because i have a job and my job drains all my introverted energy 😂😂

I just found out last Friday that my team collegues (all of them are team leads) are suffering from depression or the so called burn out syndrom. I guess it's my boss' fault. He never gives clear jobs, changes his mind from day to day, we have to manage unclear responsibilities and the baddest thing is that we think that our boss is too stressed out himself.

Do you have any advice for me how we as team could solve that besides changing employer? One thing to mention is, that my boss likes to hear himself talking. That makes it even harder for a guy like myself who is more or less introverted to come up with good arguments which are not overheard or overtalked immediately. What are your feedback strategies to your own boss, how do you bring such stuff on the table?

I fear that when nothing happens, my company will suffer very hard when the whole product engineering departement will fall apart (¼ of the whole company and is responsible for engineering and maintaining of internal services and managed services for our customers).

Well at least it was worth writing about it, maybe my subconcious mind will come up with a brilliant idea itself in the near future in some asynchronous way. But you might be the one with that valuable input, then don't hesitate to share, it will be welcome.

Remember my first day at my job post from almost 2 weeks ago?

I have to say that I've built great connections in the company even though I'm introverted and am like bro-ey and joke-ey with everyone there.

All the package unboxing, sorting, cutting and moving made me more fit. I'm nonstop moving the whole day from point A to point B to point C etc. I even got a smart watch to accurately track my amount of steps (+25-33% more steps than Samsung Health in my experience). I'm at 11,000 steps everyday on average and I want to push this further.

Remember that Daniel? We've become great coworkers after the initial heat (we kept giving each other orders) and are having a breakfast with the department we are temporarily in.

We also get to leave the company 1 hour earlier because we are done with all of today's work. The department chief and the company chief are impressed.

Fuck it..
What’s the point?
Why do we care about a point at all?
Why do we even try to make sense out of it?
I’m religious but if you think about believe long enough that’s a point to question as well.

I guess the 2nd lockdown is getting to me.
I’m extremely introverted but this I too isolated even for me.

In the the 1st lockdown I made it for 3 weeks, now I’m breaking after 1.5weeks....

Got back home from my last therapy session. Situation was kind of strange. I had only done about two sessions but my therapist told me they wouldn't be a good fit for me as I have a pretty good grasp of what my issues are and what I want to do to fix them.

Thing is, I'm an introverted person. And I work with people who are much more extroverted than me. And that's not really surprising, most Americans are to a fault extremely extroverted and it drives me nuts.

I hate their gas guzzling trucks and suv's that haul almost nothing so they can go to Walmart to buy shit they don't need. I hate our advertising with it's whoring to the public. I hate our media for being shallow as fuck. I hate our politicians who whore out capitalism to the lowest fucking bidder to get elected.

I do like some American companies though, and we have a lot of pretty locations you can see. I like Minneapolis, I'd probably like Seattle and Portland too but I've never been there.

I don't know. I think I'm at a breaking point in my frustration with living in the States, and I need to decide next year if I want to make a call to leave the country or decide on a different state to live in. Someplace that's far less conservative than Iowa. I'm single, I could manage to make a major move change without it affecting anyone but me.

I'm feeling a bit tense. I just want to write code and calm the fuck down a couple levels.

Sorry if I've been pissy. :(

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

I'm supposed to be the introverted, non-people person! But the client meetings I'm in for my college senior project go off the rails into awkward mumbling unless I step in and take the tiniest bit of effort in driving a meeting.

Am I doomed folks to become a BA or other person dealing with clients all day, pls end me now

Is it just me or does anyone else get more worn out from the meeting a than the actual technical shit... being introverted and having to do so many meetings a day is exhausting

I want to work with managers with introverted personality who wouldn't call you or setup zoom meetings for stuff that can simply be texted.

COV-SARS-2 rant!!
I know most of us engineers/developers/etc are quite introverted people, who are happiest when we are left alone with our best friends (we all know who/what those are 👨🏼‍💻), but I miss working with colleagues in the office, and seeing some faces as well :(
Discussing plans over hangouts/slack can sometimes be cumbersome, compared to face-to-face conversations 🤷‍♂️

I sincerely want to thank Google.
I was this introverted guy with lots of questions to ask.
Whenever I try to ask question I could not. It might be - my ass liked the bench too much or gravity was different for me.
Anyway, Thanks google.

!rant

People just annoy me. I don't feel comfortable around them.. they don't understand most of the things I say and I hate listening to them because they usually just don't get to the fucking point.

I really think that most people are just not able to think efficiently or logically.

When talking to smart people, I really enjoy it and am able to have discussions with them that last for hours..

Is this normal or am I just "special"?

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

What just happened?
I had my annual review meeting with my bosses and everything was going well and I was doing a great job and I was working so independently and they were happy I used my training budget efficiently, great attendance and I have good standing at the customer, although I'm the only representative there. BUT... BUT... BUT... there will be no chance of a raise this year, because the company is not doing quite well currently (OK, I can understand that part) and also because I didn't do anything for business development, didn't bring new projects or anything.
I'm a developer, your typical slightly introverted geek. I'm not doing sales. That's not my job. That's not me. That's a part of why I'm not a contractor. I had this before in another job, and those expectations which seem to always only come out during those evaluations, were part of the reason why I left.
Fuck this for putting me in this situation again.
I'm really wanting to start looking for an in-house job at some production company again. Do these jobs still exist? Those consulting companies seem to expect things from me I can't and won't deliver.

AAAAAAAA I want to talk with my friends about programming and software, but there is only one friend who understands even a BIT (Rest he doesn't just care about probably). It's driving me crazy that i can't talk with any of my friends about programming, because they don't know shit about it. I really can't make new friends either because i somehow have forgotten how to talk to humans (i'm extremely introverted lol). It's paiful when you have to explain a programming meme.

I know I shouldn't compare myself with someone but I couldn't stop myself this time.
One of my college classmate, now works with me in the same team. 4 years experience. I'm single, introverted and working at a fresher level. She, on the other hand, getting married with the guy she was in relationship with, she's confident and an ambivert, she's trusted at work ( I don't think she's a very nice person though) , also she's one level senior.

She's getting married, I feel that I don't have so much. I'm kind of just trying to love through the days, I remember in college she was dumber than me. But she's good. Doing good.

On the one hand, as an avid programmer having a non-programmer partner, we (I) once wanted to mod some Gameboy Pokémon games (Crystal), but the games were written in Assembly and I was definitely not getting myself into that. My partner was rather sad, as this was quite a big project for the both of us, but it was never finished, and it was still complicated to explain to him why Assembly is such a bitch. Nevertheless, we found other projects to have fun with (simplest of them: random movie picker that chooses a movie based on title/genre/etc. from our own movie list file).

On the other hand, explaining and making programming exciting for people who are not into it, so you still seem like an interesting person for new dates (poly relationship), is really hard. But I would also blame my introverted self and not only programming for unsuccessful dating :D

Can anyone tell me what getting a CS degree at CMU is like?

My younger bro is graduating from there but from what he always says, it's just work work work work...

Never told me he did anything interesting or extra curriculars though my impression was CMU is the place where all the cool new stuff happens like Pixar, DARPA, robots, etc.

I went to NYU (useless business degree) and am probably more introverted than him yet compared to him it seems I spent 4 yrs partying...

My first time standing up and talking about something for an hour tomorrow. "Knowledge sharing" as if I don't do enough one on one...

Why must you have to do this shit to get promoted? Why can't managers trust that your good at what you do without the public cock sucking?

Back to my introverted rock for a while.

I'll answer this seriously, since every other answer just jokes about having no social life.

I used to introverted as fuck long ago. Now I enjoy a fairly decent, balanced social life. Here's some points that may help.

1) This is the most important point. Schedule your time with discipline. Especially if you freelance on the side like me. If you decided to finish a project, mark your calendar and get to it. No dawdling. If you decided to watch a movie, mark your calendar get to it. Decide that you will spend an X portion of your time with entertainment and Y with work. Don't let them overflow into each other.

2) Don't hate Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and other tools. Okay facebook is shit. But he rest are just tools. You can use them to connect meaningfully or to follow shitty things and make your feed toxic. If this isn't your cup of tea, at least try using them on the weekends, you'll make new friends.

3) If your work requires you to work long hours and weekends ok often just quit. You decide what your limits are. I quit a similar toxic job and it's made a world of a difference.

4) If you have a significant other, establish communication rules and boundaries with them. It's perfectly fine to tell your spouse or boy/girlfriend that you're busy at the moment. It is equally all right to tell your work that ou aren't available because you're busy with family/friends.

5) Visit a gym and get your stamina up. You'll meet fun people. It takes a healthy body to have a social life or you'll just be permanently tired.

[off topic] (good thing this isn't stack overflow)
2.5 years ago I moved 35 minutes north of all my friends for a job and only see them about once a year now. I have a wife, kid and a few clients so spending time meeting new people has become a disability.

I have a bar near me that does board games and DnD n shit. I thought I would be able to pop in, make a few friends and play a few games of cards against humanity or something.

Nope. Even though I knew I was the coolest guy in the place (I'm a musician and up til a year ago played bass in rock/metal/90s bands ) , couldn't bring myself to talk to anyone or try to play any of the games. I sat at the bar on my phone, like a nerd.

Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.

And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!

I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.

The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.

4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.

I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.

Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..

Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.

Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.

When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.

I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.

But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.

THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.

We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.

But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...

Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers

SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah

How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?

How to manage privacy and online presence?

I've seen the privacy advocacy making its rounds around here lately. The concept of hiding as much info as possible is something I'd like to try, but on the other hand I do want to maintain social media and have an outer presence. Additionally, I do want to use some Google services even if I do move my email (mostly developer related things).

I try and be a fairly social person alongside my introverted dev life, so this has been my dilemma the past few days. I could move to those obscure open source social media sites but that defeats the purpose of being connected with the non-tech people in my life.

How would you deal with noisy neighbours that cause sleep interruptions every. single. night? Y’know, as an introverted person who’s scared of being stabbed by said neighbours.

The pettier the better.

Fuck the dev! Who decided to change shit on their site without telling me...

It's your fucking app do you want it to work!?

I can't connect the two if you keep changing shit!

I know this dev to be a fucking asshole!

The introverted and silent people can be heard in chats in video calls (zoom), can be heard in slack chats. But from my experience, it looks like the majority is yet to consider that as important. Text communication may not be perfect because it's hard to capture a lot in text, like emotions, tone, maybe some might be able to capture them if not all. But text is still something, rather than nothing, but I usually see people listen more to spoken words than care about texts. Not to mention the craziness of parallel conversations in text chat during video calls where video call has one conversation going on while text chat has a totally unrelated conversation going at some point. One could say - maybe parallel conversations in text chats are a hindrance to people trying to communicate over text rather than speak up through voice / audio

Anyone freelancing even if they are very introverted?

Would love to try freelancing but i fear that me being introverted could make me seem incompetent.

How do I do it I wonder ? Get stuck with the same retards playing the same strange shady personality types I have to dodge ? Seriously wtf

Betcha if I stuffed a tube steak in them both they'd be more warmed up heh

It's like why do I have to constantly deal with some twitchy copy of some person I previously knew who is doing his impression poorly of some weird introverted jackass with a funny hairstyle from 2001 ?

And what fuckinh sense did that ever make ? Doing something to stand out if you prefer lack.of interaction and attention ?

Only crazy bitches who thought everyone was out to rape them until you found a way to flip their slut switch acted like that in my age group !

Of course I yet know how they actually are God need to find another job