How to be alone: the difference between loneliness and solitude

This sounds like me. I once went to a week long conference where I realized at the end that during the entire week I could count on 2 hands the number of words I had spoken to other people during that time. I don't have the desire or need to speak with other people. I'm happy with my own thoughts. Or as Jane Austen wrote, "Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions."

If you think things like "Engaging with other people is messy and hard to control." - this is an introverted viewpoint. The assumption you are making is that engaging with people is draining, you need something to push you to do it or... you just won't.

I'm in a weird space - I'm an extrovert, but I functioned as an Introvert for most of my life. I'm transgender, so as a child and a young adult, I put constant and tremendous energy into conforming to my assigned at birth gender. It made every social interaction, especially with strangers, feel like a drain. I would much rather be at home playing video games where I could play characters I identified with or where gender was not a factor at all. It's part of what drew me to engineering to begin with; computers neither knew nor cared about your gender.

I'm not like that at all now. I go to large gatherings where I know nobody and walk out with new friends. I go to clubs, I date heavily, I dress flashy, I'm constantly interacting with new people and even an awkward mess of an interaction is a good story to tell. Even the video games I play are mostly so I can talk to other people about them. Engaging with other people doesn't feel messy at all to me.

What makes this really relevant is - growing up introverted, my choice of career (as an engineer) and historically friends has left me surrounded by introverts. Who totally misunderstand our motivations sometimes.

For instance, becoming a manager - going to meetings and interacting with people all day? That sounds like the dream. But when I say that it catches people off guard; doesn't every engineer hate those parts of management? Isn't the only upside of being a manager the ability to make decisions?

Or when recruiters are pitching jobs to me, all I really care about is the people, the position, how I'll interact with my coworkers day to day. I can learn a new tech stack. I can and have moved anywhere from front end to devops. But the reality is that if I don't like the people, if I don't have a social engagement to the work - ideally with a lot of pairing, mentoring, and other opportunities for social interaction - I'll lose motivation. Remote only is my worst nightmare, and "we split the work up and go off to our desks for a few days" drives me nuts. But the social environment is almost never pitched.

But Engineering is full of introverts, so it is a context where, for once, the extroverts are the rare and misunderstood breed :P.

I used to believe this about myself too. Then one day I came to the profound realization that I do in fact have both the need and the desire to talk to others. I had just been suppressing it by using my own thoughts as a distraction.

For me, the upside is in coaching and growing talent, or finding the right chemistry to enable work otherwise not possible.

[edit: I’m strongly introverted, but love this part of management]

Well then that makes two of us. Watching the junior people grow is among my favorite things. I have seriously considered teaching as a profession though economic incentives are what they are.

It's very refreshing to see such a viewpoint on chemistry. I've never even seen the chemistry be considered in any staffing or team decision (at least openly), or a manager put effort into fixing a broken relationship. It feels like interpersonal chemistry is almost entirely ignored in favor of skill set or basic resource allocation.

For example, I had a coworker I simply could not get along with (and the feeling was mutual). We were on a two person team so all of my work went through that coworker. I told my boss (repeatedly, over the course of most of a year) that I would rather work with anyone else in the company, and I needed to do so at least some because I was getting burned out. His solution was to make that coworker (on our two person team) my boss, since he didn't have time to manage the relationship.

It made sense from a pure resource point of view; the relationship was showing signs of needing managing and not getting it, so by promoting a new manager, that would happen. There were two of us in a somewhat isolated area, and nobody else really had the skill set for that area, so technically we were the best match.

But it totally ignored the people chemistry - the fact that the two of us would argue for hours over the most ridiculous things (quite visibly), and both feared the other's reaction to any work we did. I don't question my coworker's competence, we were simply on opposite ends of ideological extremes on too many things for that to ever have worked. It would have been far better to have me switch roles, split my time, train someone on the skills needed, just about anything else. The actual solution, naturally, felt like a slap to the face.