The same applies with our industry's "socially inept introverts." Just to demonstrate how complicated the issue can be, Pausch's students are disproportionately foreign students. As such, they are less familiar with the English language and American culture. Therefore, even people who may be otherwise socially functional in their home countries will likely be perceived as socially inept here because of the language and cultural differences. So Pausch's observations may be perfectly accurate, but his conclusions -- that it's a question of individual personality rather than of culture shock -- might not be as widely applicable.

However, I still believe that even computer professionals who are born and raised in the U.S. are disproportionately introverted. My own observations and research agree with Pausch's opinion as well. Again, I am not stating that all computer professionals are socially inept but that there are enough people to justify the stereotype.

Several studies have been conducted on the personality types of computer professionals. One study used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and found that 25 percent of computer professionals fit either the INTJ (introverted-intuitive-thinking-judging) or INTP (introverted-intuitive-thinking-perceiving) personality types. Statistically however INTJs and INTPs make up only 2 percent of the general population.

Both INT personality types imply that someone is methodical and logical in their approach to things -- ideal traits for understanding how computers work. Likewise, INT people are also characterized as socially inept. These studies are at least 10 years old, and maybe there has been some shift as the job market has changed, but the precedent is there.

Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department is a leader in the development of new computational theory and does cutting-edge research. I suspect that the students who successfully perform this research are inclined to enjoy working long hours focusing on how computers process information, as opposed to interacting with diverse groups of people. I believe that if we relied on extroverts for computational theory breakthroughs, the breakthroughs would never happen. As a profession, we owe a major debt of thanks to introverts who can sit in front of computers for hours rather than seek regular social interactions.