> 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.
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.
> Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave.
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 believe the point was that people detest that working environment, and those with a choice will pull the ripcord, whereas people who can't get another job will stay. I've seen that happen.
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"
> ... favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the engineers I really want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard problems, are much less likely to be in that group.
I, too, read "group" as "extroverted engineers," and I don't really see alternative readings.
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.