You should never be angry at work
56 points by MooreMachine
56 points by MooreMachine
I disagree. I believe that anger is healthy and should be shown. Anger is not being a dick or cruelty, but being angry about things is only natural: when there 15th new dashboard measuring your "AI productivity" this quarter and you better do it right or elsee or when you only get word salad answers from SVPs and up about what the great plan actually is, or when your management chain conveniently ignores the realities "on the ground" and dreams up things that will not work, because it does not matter how often you explain things, they must align themselves with whatever their leaders are saying. Said leaders will be gone in 6-18 months, but here we are. Or when your colleague asks you to review a document they threw together in 10 minutes with claude that is full of factually wrong things one can check in a few seconds after you told them to not do that again. Or when you are in a meeting explaining something and everyone is just doing other stuff on their laptop not paying attention. That is just a typical week where I work, so of course I get angry.
I think the appropriate response for an environment like that is resignation, in either of the two senses of the word.
It's not healthy to be more invested in doing things right than the people in charge.
I would argue especially when you feel this way, then anger will not help. Then you already expressed that you fundamentally disagree with the direction of then company and unless you are in a leadership position, there is nothing you can do to change it.
But by being angry you just spoil it for the people who are not. Particularly if you are a people manager somewhere it’s better for you to either play along or leave as otherwise you just create a horrible environment for everyone involved, particularly juniors that report to you.
Anger can be healthy, but it isn't always. The linked article does talk about letting anger be shown briefly. The larger point the article is making, I think, holds. I've been the angry person, and TBH it wasn't effective or helpful for others or myself much of the time.
I wish I could replay some of the work scenarios I've been angry in and approach them more constructively. (One of the unfortunate things about life is that we tend to learn lessons and develop skills after they might've been most useful...)
Maybe this is pedantic, but your comment seems to be getting at "disagreement or dissatisfaction is important to express" more than anger, necessarily. At least to me, anger is a blanket emotion to capture reactions to those kind of negative feelings, and we blanket it because the ways it's expressed is usually something to watch out for (or be wary of, at least).
Anger won't change any of that, and it could even be counterproductive because to everybody else getting angry makes you look like a disagreeable hot-head who's difficult to work with.
I think there's an important distinction missing here. I'm often angry at things or at problems.
I'm angry at my keyboard when I start typing into the wrong window. I'm angry at the process eating 100% CPU. I'm angry at the coffee maker when it runs out of water.
I'm almost never angry at a person. People are great, they're all doing their best.
Anger at things can be very motivating! I fix a lot of paper cuts out of anger.
People are great, they're all doing their best.
This is false—to my mind obviously so. In fact, both halves of the sentence are false.
I can't see any good reason to deny (1) or (2). We can discuss what the right response is: e.g., Aristotle says we should get angry when people are knowingly bad or harmful (he thinks that people who do not get angry at the appropriate times and to the appropriate degree have a character flaw); the Stoics say that anger is (often) a natural response, but that it's (always) unhelpful and therefore we should learn to minimize anger. But just saying "People are great, they're all doing their best" seems just willfully blind to me.
(Note: saying "People always do <what they think is> their best" won't fix the argument. People do not always do what they think is best. I think all adults who are honest with themselves know this from their own experience. That is, all adults who are honest with themselves know that they themselves do not always do what they think is best.)
But just saying "People are great, they're all doing their best" seems just willfully blind to me.
FWIW, I might rephrase this to: it’s normally most helpful to act as if people are great and doing their best.
Or to turn it around: getting angry or showing anger at a colleague is almost never going to be productive. It’s rare that you’re going to accomplish your goals more effectively by saying “Bob’s an asshole”.
To the extent that colleagues aren’t doing their best, you may perhaps acknowledge this when routing around them to avoid letting them derail you. But even then, yelling at them (or even about them) is unlikely to be helpful.
When consulted by colleagues I always tell them to Assume Good Faith, both by default and when stretched.
I also agree with channeling anger (though it's more often just annoyance) towards resolving issues rather than working around them. The idiom "using something in anger" comes to mind.
It’s rare that you’re going to accomplish your goals more effectively by saying “Bob’s an asshole”.
Sure, but that's not equivalent to the first part of what you say, namely "it’s normally most helpful to act as if people are great and doing their best."
To put this another way, I wonder how much work "normally" is doing there. Below, ibookstein goes further and says he "always" tells colleagues "to Assume Good Faith, both by default and when stretched." If someone kicks me in the shins every morning (that would stretch me for sure), I am not doing myself or them any favors by assuming good faith. Going back to the workplace, there are colleagues who are bad—and bad in all sorts of ways. We need to be able to talk about those colleagues. Hopefully, they will change their behavior. If they won't, we may need to remove them from the workplace (or maybe remove ourselves from that workplace, depending on what options are available). One sort of colleague might be a problem because they are frequently late on essential tasks or they rarely respond to pages when on call, or...or...or. In these cases, I'm talking about poor performance. Another sort of colleague might be sexist, might harass people, might be racist. All of these behaviors are real. I can't see why we would want to deny that. Telling ourselves and our colleagues to always or even mostly ("normally") assume otherwise is not a good strategy.
To be clear, this is orthogonal to this issue of anger. You may be right that you should never (or almost never) "show anger" towards a colleague, but that's very different from saying that you should not (ever? usually?) believe or express that someone is behaving in ways that are a problem or wrong.
tl;dr: assuming good faith and good intentions across the board is wrong. Maybe I'm being too literal, but I think many of you are wildly overstating a reasonable rule of thumb (namely, assume good faith and good intentions). When you overdo that rule of thumb, it becomes both false and unhelpful for oneself and others. We shouldn't assume the person kicking us in the shins means well.
One thing to remember, especially at work, is that thing you're angry about may have been created, with great effort, and with constraints and pressures to which you are ignorant, by the person sitting next to you.
Exactly this! In our team we're often angry at devices we're working with and it's quite nice when someone asks what's wrong when they hear someone swearing at those dogshit pieces of hardware (because they're messed up in unique, peculiar ways and often they're not deterministic with their issues)
Wonderful read, with some well worded reasoning.
Though it does feel to me, and this might be me misunderstanding "anger", that I'd want to avoid hate/resentment/strong anger.
Personally, sometimes I appreciate the feeling of anger/irritation when discussing things when people can communicate those feelings.
The only tip I have for that is, don't blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, but try to dig a bit deeper on why the situation happens while keeping in mind that usually colleagues do not intent on inciting anger.
This hits close to home... this week I was at the receiving end of someone's frustration/anger at work. Our interaction was still within the bounds of civility, but it was nevertheless a taxing and unproductive exchange.
Healthy workplaces route around anger in the same way that networks route around damage. Emotionally unreliable engineers will get left out of conversations that might cause them to blow up.
Amen to that. I can see myself putting it into practice, or leaving for greener pastures.
Engineers who are highly effective tend to get listened to — at minimum by their colleagues, and eventually by managers and product managers who want to extract as much value as possible from them.
As much as I want this to be true, it really isn't a majority of the time.
Healthy workplaces route around anger in the same way that networks route around damage. Emotionally unreliable engineers will get left out of conversations that might cause them to blow up.
This might not be the worst approach, but I think a truly healthy workplace would do more if an engineer is routinely “blowing up.”
Even less than truly healthy environments I’ve been in have treated someone blowing up as a big deal.
Maybe the author’s standard for anger/blowing up is lower than mine? Maybe what I would call griping is what he calls anger?
I like to teach my employees that when you lose your temper at someone you transfer some of your power to them.
I used to be showing anger at work. At some point in my previous company I even yelled at coworkers for not taking things seriously (i.e., not caring much about a failed deployment on a weekend). I remember that during one of the deployment weekend, I was so angry that my manager just left the room and let me deal with everyone else. Now that I reflect back I was foolish and so lucky not to be fired.
For me now, being angry at work shows that you are too vested in the company and it is not even yours. I still do care about my work and its integrity but I also care more about cultivating the relationship with my team and people I work with. It has opened my eyes a lot how a little diplomacy can push things ahead and people together. So in a way, showing anger at work is something like talking politics or religion which I will never do.
I agree with this, insofar as I don’t usually find that anger is helpful in a software engineering setting.
Others may experience it differently, but I’ve found that allowing myself to feel sustained anger at work usually makes me less able to get things done, damages relationships with colleagues, and makes it harder for me to disconnect at the end of the day. Not to mention that (IME) it’s just plain unpleasant as an experience!
What helps me with this is just trying to maintain a sense of perspective. Even when I’ve been on-call and getting paged at 3am every night, at the end of the day, the consequences of problems at work have mostly boiled down to… money. In my normal work, and I think for most software engineers, no one is going to die or go to prison or experience anything worse than the loss of a job.
Now that would suck! Not trying to minimize it. I certainly never want to lose a job or even lose money for my employer.
But, well. My mom is a nurse, my partner has been on-call for university residence halls with real student health issues, I have friends who have been military or first responders and seen loss of life or limb in the course of work. Up against that kind of thing, a computer going down and losing a bunch of money just doesn’t seem worth getting worked up about.
That’s not to say I never experience anger or frustration! It’s natural and sometimes people are jerks. But what I try to do is take a breath, remind myself of the (lack of) real consequences for failure, and just take the next useful step towards my goals. If we fail? I mean, too bad, but we’re all going home at the end of the day.
(Note: if you are doing safety-critical work then everything above doesn’t apply as much. I salute you, thanks for doing important work, I’m glad I’m not doing that!)
Hmm. I think you can be upset and show it now and then. There are OK circumstances for that, like defending your teammates. But keep it brief and don't say anything you can't take back. In an us-vs-them situation, there's a fine line between supporting your teammates and reinforcing that division.
(This is not directed at the author, only in first- and second-person because it's easier to write, and it's a catharsis. And know, not everyone's situation is as cut and dry, sometimes people (managers) just suck.)
It's easy to not get angry when you do no actual work and just drum up work for others. You act like the software is always at fault, when 99.999% of the time it's human error, but can sometimes take hours to prove -- over and over. You constantly expect everything to be a hotfix because you don't have the foggiest clue what "hotfix" not only means, but also what it costs. You add new work on the last day of the sprint that has to be shoved into the sprint, despite testing already nearing completion.
And I'm not supposed to get angry?
Yeah, I feel like I'm in a constant state of anger because you obvious idiots have no clue what you're doing running a development "team", that now consists of one person, who does literally all the work, because you mismanaged everything for over a decade and laid off half the company.
You bet I'm angry.
But...
I'm getting less angry over time, like the author. The reason: none of this actually matters. The software I work on will be gone much sooner than I'd imagine. The people I get angry at will be gone much sooner than I'd imagine. This work is not world-changing. If it was gone tomorrow, no one would care. If I were gone tomorrow, no one would really care (this is an existential observation, nothing more).
At the end of the day, you are not worth my time and effort into having any strong feelings, despite it continuing to happen. And ultimately what remains, however, is the stress -- which lasts far longer than the anger ever could.
After all this time, what I've learned is not that I shouldn't become angry, that will happen or not happen depending on the ambient goings-on. What I've learned is that idiots get promoted. And ignorance clearly is bliss.
And I sure do miss the feeling of bliss.
It's a hard thing for me to agree with, because I've used anger quite a lot in my career to effective results, but I think Sean is right here. Calling it a local maximum is quite fitting.
I still don't quite understand what the alternate to anger is. Rational action in service of an overarching goal cannot be applied to everything, simply because no matter how hard you try, insisting that everyone share the same goals and be aligned with the organization is never going to happen.
Perhaps the answer is calculating, Machiavellian manipulation instead, although I'm not sure that's better. Certainly feels less honest.
Sharp insights in this article. It avoids the trope of "redirect anger to the root causes of our discontent," except for a nuanced rebuttal at the end.
Think of “caring about your work” as a vertical tube, unsealed at either end. You fill the tube by pumping in emotional investment from the bottom. If you have too little, it drains away and you end up as a useless coaster. But if you have too much, it overflows and you end up as an angry engineer that people have to work around.
More thematic: Maybe it's a "call stack"? You add emotional investment functions. Too little and nothing runs. Too much and the stack overflows.
Awesome article, really insightful and so clearly explained!
showing a little bit of anger at work can sometimes be useful .. However, it’s still always a mistake to be angry
In my experience, while the above has been true many times, other people (1) can't tell the difference and (2) think you are crazy if you explain it like this. This is a big problem, because anger (or perceived anger) is also an incredibly efficient way to get things done.