I don’t think it’s the same. The author frames it as a social pressure. It actually reads as a personal anxiety that they project on the world in my opinion. They started feeling competitive about books as an 8 year old? I’m not shocked they assume anyone asking them what they’re reading is some test. I can’t imagine walking through the world like this.
Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.
> well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!
This made me laugh so hard. You're completely right, it's like someone setting up a joke by saying "THIS IS HILARIOUS YOU'RE GONNA LOVE IT" why don't you just get on with it then
Yes. A lot of people here forget how many lower level jobs there are out there. I'd recommend focusing on JavaScript and front end engineering if you like that, or some back end language and framework like ruby and rails. You can learn enough in about a year to get a job.
> Chen said air pollution was most likely to be the cause of the loss of intelligence, rather than simply being a correlation.
Why? You can't just say that and expect people to trust you. The fact that they followed the same people may reduce the chances of certain DNA traits having an effect but how does that rule out other commonalities in environmental conditions. If you're in a polluted city it seems likely that you're in a large city. So do all the common traits of a large city also reduce your intelligence?
I want to read the study but I don't want to subscribe. If there is logical proof in the study that this is not simply a correlation, the guardian piece does not represent it.
London is really not that polluted. It rains too much to be very polluted. AQI is currently 88 in the worst areas. In China many cities are often 150-200 range. India is off the charts, my friend who makes commercial air quality sensor arrays said most sensor tech maxes out way below ambient Indian levels and readings cannot therefore be trusted - nobody knows how bad it is.
That’s vastly insufficient as far as empirical evidence is concerned. There are many things that coincide with pollution, which is what the commenter is saying. You need to demonstrate how you picked out pollution from everything comingled with it. That’s what’s being asked about here.
EDIT: Disregard this stuffy reply, my humor detector was off.
The response was tongue-in-cheek: the commenter implied that the article was insufficient due to the journalist being less intelligent due to living in a polluted city.
You make an excellent point. How do they rule out other leading causes of the loss of intelligence?
There have been studies that show high amounts of road traffic cause increased secretions of a certain enzyme into the frontal cortex, causing high levels of stress and increased memory loss.
I mean we're in a forum of people who would absolutely use one social network and automate mirroring to others. Doubt very few normal people even knew the feature existed. This change pretty much affects spammers, social media managers, and powerusers -- exactly the kind of people you probably don't want to interact with anyway on social media.
You're implying that being selfish is inherently bad. Of course it's selfish. You're doing something for you. It's only a problem if it unfairly hurts someone else. How is that the case here?
The goal is not to copy something and pass it off as your own work. It's an exercise to learn how to think in this technology in a way that's not just another todo app or whatever. You use what you learn to actually build something that can go in your portfolio.
Here's what I don't understand about this argument - if you're negotiating for a new job, wouldn't the implication be that your current employer is not aware of it? And that any contact for this kind of information by your potential new employer would be an obvious breach of that secrecy?
Do you all quit your jobs before you find new ones? What am I missing here?
This is a weak argument and frankly the introvert extrovert juxtaposition is trite at this point. The article sounds like frustrated happy hour conjecture by somebody who has never actually worked in sales. Cherry picks a lot in order to make its case. Yes selling takes a lot more than a smile and persistence. But why can't extroverts be good at research and listening? What if you're driven and enjoy a good balance of quiet time and social time? It’s rare that anyone is this binary and thinking that way is ignorant and kind of rude. You’re essentially saying “extroverts are dumb they don’t know as much as they should”. Come on. And also there will always be some form of cold calling in sales. The point is not literally the call, its finding a way to introduce yourself to a complete stranger and create a relationship. Whether thats through email, the phone, or walking up to someone at a conference, there will always be some version of this. If you’re relying on landing pages and conversion optimization to sell at all scales of software, someone else is going to beat you by knowing a guy who knows the CTO, or being the nephew of a VP, or having the guts to walk up to someone at an event.
Theres obviously a lot to learn from archetypal human behavior, but when it’s presented like this it just falls flat.
I have yet to meet a good salesperson who didn't research, listen, and react. That's part of the sales process.. to understood who you're selling to and why.
This is Sales 101 and has nothing to do with being a intro/extro-vert.
The best sales people I've worked with (in a software/services B2B context - specifically when the customers are large companies) are into long-term relationship and trust building.
They analyze the hell out of the customer from an organizational perspective and really try to figure out what problem they need to get solved.
They are definitely extroverts. They are interesting people to be around, have great conversational and wining and dining skills, etc.
They know their limits when it comes to technology and see themselves as facilitators of deep technical discussions between the prospective customer's tech people and the internal staff. They are happy to take the backseat when it comes to tech discussions - while still listening, taking notes, etc. (That they'll then come back with to i.e. me to try to understand and figure out the next step.)
To be clear, introverts can also be "interesting people to be around" and "have great conversational and wining and dining skills".
The difference between an introvert and an extrovert doesn't lie in one's abilities in that regard, or even in whether or not one enjoys social interaction, but rather in whether one finds social interaction to be energizing or exhausting.
The article seems to misunderstand this difference, too, but in a different way: by equating "extrovert" and "introvert" with what are often colloquially referred to as "A-type" and "B-type" personalities (or maybe "red" and "blue", or some other distinction along those lines). Just like with leadership positions ("A-types want to lead, but B-types are better at it"), the conventional wisdom is that "A-types" are more likely to actually want to be in a sales position, but "B-types" are more likely to actually win over a customer. Extroversion and introversion are probably correlated here, but I reckon it having more to do about one's approach to communication with others.
As a contrast, the worst sales people I have been around are extrovert and think they know the tech, so the can handle everything on their own. This has inevitably resulted in losses/disasters.
These kind of sales people are a better fit when the product has been in the marketplace for 1-2 years and has survived ~5-10 customers. By then it's a lot more packaged and well-defined. You still need a strong central sales "command structure" though.
I have actually met some (semi-)introverted sales people. They never made any sales, or got anywhere close to it.
The best sales people I've worked with (in a software/services B2B
context - specifically when the customers are large companies) are
into long-term relationship and trust building.
Adding nuance, I was intrigued by an argument [0] that "relationship builders" weren't the out-performers in sales. In fact, they were the least likely to outperform in complex B2B sales.
This is spot-on. As someone who works in enterprise sales, the best performers (if performance is based on growing investment from the client into x product), are challengers.
Sales tactics, like aggressive selling or throwing everything at the wall see what sticks, does not work in enterprise sales. The enterprise sell is complex and nuanced based on all the decision makers and influencers. It helps to be less of a "classic-sales" person and more of a doctor. You want to diagnose, understand, and provide a recommendation. Often-times like a doctor, the client (patient) does not want hear or accept the solution (antidote). This is where the challenger mindset comes into play, the great sales folks are pushing for the "true solution" even if the client-team is not onboard. It can take time to get a champion on the client side who sees the light. Just to be clear enterprise sales only works if the solution is solving true business outcomes.
For selling to new clients, its important for the sales team to run a client diagnostic to understand if the product (solution) has a right to win. Its just the start of understanding the client. I will say getting to know the client and their hurdles is crucial and the clients are experts at their problems. But, they are not experts at solving it. That is why the sales person is there and why the product exists.
It obviously differs quite a lot depending on the type of customer.
An example where I have seen the type of relationship-building salesperson outperform the aggressive kind of sales person: sales to large, stable incumbent companies in Europe.
For sure! I think the nuance (and if you read the article and the study) is the best performers are consistently "assertive" -- or in the middle between passive and aggressive.
Yeah. They have to be able to carefully thread that needle between pushy/assertive vs annoying quite carefully and intelligently. And counteract the pushy factor with charm/hosting skills.
.. and that's why this job is so highly paid (the kind of people I'm talking about: ~300k/year or more).
In my experience, computer-related B2B, that's pretty much spot on. I've never known a successful sales rep who didn't come across as an extrovert by any reasonable definition of the word. Did they all start out that way and it just came naturally? I have no idea.
But that doesn't mean they're all the frat boy stereotype, taking customers out wining and dining all the time, and then signing the deal on the golf course.
Rather they spend a lot of time and effort navigating large organizations, engaging technical people to talk with and work with the right people at the customer, and developing a relationship that will eventually lead to a sale.
" has nothing to do with being a intro/extro-vert."
I think it does.
Extroverts are 'outwardly focused' - meaning 'present' - paying attention to others, the world around them.
Introverts are 'inwardly focused', more in their heads.
Obviously, people can do both - but extroverts have a lifetime of skills in 'relationship management'. They know how to do small talk, how to set the mood, how to change the subject, how to engage with a difficult subject.
> Extroverts are 'outwardly focused' - meaning 'present' - paying attention to others, the world around them. Introverts are 'inwardly focused', more in their heads. Obviously, people can do both - but extroverts have a lifetime of skills in 'relationship management'. They know how to do small talk, how to set the mood, how to change the subject, how to engage with a difficult subject.
This is a common misconception, but that's actually not how the words "introversion" and "extraversion"[sic] are used either by Jung or by contemporary psychology. It's hard to classify the distinction in a single sentence, but to generalize: introversion and extroversion have more to do with how a person 'receives' external stimuli, not in how they react or respond to it.
Extroverts are not inherently better at "relationship management" skills like small talk, how to change the subject, or how to engage with difficult subjects.
> Extroverts are not inherently better at "relationship management" skills like small talk, how to change the subject, or how to engage with difficult subjects.
Since this flies in the face of common sense (and my personal experience of 20 years in selling B2B software).. do you have any research to back up this claim? (Besides name-dropping Carl Gustav Jung.)
I'd recommend reading Susan Cain's Quiet as a starting point. It's very accessible for people without a background in psychology, and it references the original research where appropriate.
> frankly the introvert extrovert juxtaposition is trite at this point
Why? There's a huge amount of published research in the I/E scale in forms like the FFM. We have Ph.D.s on HN who are deeply involved in psychometrics and work with these models every day.
> But why can't extroverts be good at research and listening?
This is a much better point. They can.
The weird thing about this article is that the author uses a dichotomy like E/I, then seems to suggest that all customers dislike E salespeople. Or that, maybe, all E salespeople are the same type of person. That's simply not true.
> What if you're driven and enjoy a good balance of quiet time and social time?
This is also crucial, the question of personality type vs. personality type _development_.
Trite doesn't mean inherently bad, it's just beaten to death on a very shallow level. If you were to list the most overused themes that hot takey bloggers use to build theses around, this is one of them. And it’s a shame because I’m sure there is a lot of new, interesting, and legitimate research being done on the subject. Unfortunately that research isn’t involved in a lot of these kinds of articles, for example this one.
Spot on. There is a real, measurable difference that scientists call extroverted or introverted. Then there's a bunch of stereotypical behaviors and attributes assigned to each. This article uses the latter.
Yup, I've had high energy loud talkative sales people be great at presenting data, knowing the competition, etc. This introvert vs extrovert nonsense is getting out of hand.
That is one way of acting for extrovert people. I think it's a lot more common in North America than in Europe. There's something cultural at play here.
Questioning the introvert/extrovert dichotomy rarely goes well on Hacker News or on any tech discussion forum, so it's a somewhat unusual that you are not being downvoted hard (even though it's a small part of your point).
He didn't question the dichotomy. Quite the opposite--"Theres obviously a lot to learn from archetypal human behavior." Alternatively, depending on what was meant by archetypal, he at least didn't contradict it.
He was simply saying that its relevance has been exaggerated and twisted. And that's, frankly, difficult to disagree with. The introversion-extroversion dichotomy has been turned into a popular psychology vehicle. But you can't judge the vehicle by the absurd places people take it.
In any event, like most such dichotomies, it's implicitly understood to be a generalization, and generalizations are not suitable for describing or predicting more specific behaviors.
This is mainly a problem during rush hour, when traffic is always a problem everywhere. It might be exacerbated in that area but so much so that an average resident feels like they should be complaining about it? If your commute is from TriBeCa to FiDi (adjacent neighborhoods) and you're upset about losing 10 minutes to 'tourists' (even though, more often than not, people holding me up are clearly people who live here who don't know what common courtesy is) then talk to my coworker who lives on Staten Island and has to traverse water and take four forms of transportation to get to work, or my old boss who comes down from the tippy top of Washington Heights through some of the biggest tourist traps in the city and has to deal with more stops than you can count on your fingers.
I live in the Lower East Side and we like to go to the Financial District every now and then because NO ONE IS THERE. Go there for dinner or drinks on a Friday night or go walk around and make your way toward Battery Park on a nice Saturday afternoon. It's almost creepy, like a ghost town.
> It means never getting that babysitter on a Saturday night, or abandoning hope of ever getting tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.
Ok then don't have kids? Move to Jersey? Well-to-do people are displacing less fortunate people all over the city, talking down to them about not being able to afford to rent or buy groceries, and then they're complaining about problems like this?
I also used to ride CitiBike and yes there are people but there are also people if you drive a car, there are bikes and cars if you walk. This is a commute not a Sunday stroll or trail ride. You're participating in traffic, it can be dangerous and you need to pay attention which is true everywhere in the world.
Obviously there are crowding problems in New York City, I take the train like four stops to work and I absolutely hate the traffic as much as anyone, but the anecdotes in this article are pathetic relative to some of the other living issues people are facing here.
Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.