I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.