Secondly, you're assuming that the best developers are going to be more introverted than the developer culture/profession as a whole, which I don't think is accurate.
This is highly underrated wisdom.
If you focus on always hiring "Rockstar developers," you'll find yourself in a miserable situation of competition and egotistical conflict. Hire your team, not your developers. Get your team working like clockwork with good systems and good relationships, and your company will be rockstar with whatever people you throw at it. Look at github, stripe, twitter, facebook—you think they only hire the absolute best developers? No, they have a top 2% just like you will—your goal should be to increase the competence of your entire company, not just ignorantly hire the best and fire the worst and hope for the best.
Spot on.
You're right about the other assumptions too (though the parent may not have been that serious about them). IMHO stereotyping introverts or extroverts as being better or worse at certain tasks is a huge --ism to avoid, especially in our field. I see 'extrovertists' and 'introvertists' battle it out all the time with their propaganda and ignorant beliefs about people, and no one wins.
It's far better and more productive to be a humanist and find a good balance. Both extroverts and introverts can be valuable to your team; both extroverts and introverts can be great programmers and workers. You should strive to hire a mix, or stop using it as a metric and naturally get a mix, since these traits like many others generally fall on a normal distribution.
Don't trust your assumptions about yourself, and don't apply them to others. They're probably wrong.
This leads to an interesting thought - if you hired Linus and he started spending all his time emailing sarcastic notes to the other developers, how quickly would he get fired for "not focusing on developing code"?
Perhaps the key for CEOs is not to grow culture but to hire people who will grow it for you. You dont get to choose the culture, or even direct it. The funny Finnish bloke will. You just pay him.
So you need your lead to be awesome. But the rest can just be good people who know how to code.
* this would be someone who may not fully grasp all the concepts and sometimes writes bad code, but is open to learn and listen. There are developers who write bad code and are arrogant/confrontational about their abilities. Those should be identified and fired as quickly as possible. They will sink your ship.
I don't think that's the assumption at all. My personal experience is, unless you happen to be located where one of the "best" developers is, they simply won't move. So you have your choice of them working remotely, being lucky, or not hiring them.
I took this to mean (a) be relative to the office specifically, not the industry generally, and (b) that those very best will get sick of the required face time, quit, and get a better job (the insinuation being that that better job will likely be majority or entirely telecommuting. I may have misunderstood the intent as I commented pretty much immediately after reading it.
I just generalized it to my experience, which is less about introvert/extravert and more about "bad conditions force good people out/prevent good people from being hired"
I, too, read "group" as "extroverted engineers," and I don't really see alternative readings.
Getting interrupted kills my flow. I'm less productive as I get back into flow (although I have techniques now that let me get into flow much quicker - but that's a separate post).
However - is that drop in productivity outweighed by the increase in productivity of the interuptee not having to wait / switch tasks / fumble on and make a mistake / build the wrong thing / etc.
If I were to estimate, this probably doubled efficacy of our junior devs while halving the (direct) productivity of senior folks. In my cases, it was immediately apparent that we came out ahead: the former outnumbered the latter by several times.
