I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you’re shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn’t really matter how you’ve accomplished it. However, there’s one thing that I do think is solid advice: you should never be angry at work.
\nAnger in the workplace is toxic. An angry colleague immediately becomes a new problem to be managed, not a professional helping you manage problems. When someone is visibly angry in a meeting or in Slack, it kills the entire atmosphere: other engineers will often go quiet entirely, not wanting to make the situation worse.
\nIf you routinely “get heated” at work, the best-case scenario is that you’re part of a tight-knit team of confident people who aren’t put off by it2. No harm, no foul. But the second someone comes onto your team who’s not so confident, or you have to communicate outside of your team, it becomes a big problem.
\nHealthy 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. Decision-making will get done around them in backchannels. I’ve seen this become a self-reinforcing cycle: angry engineers aren’t consulted on key decisions, which makes them angrier, which pushes them even further away from the spaces where decisions get made, and so on.
\nYou can often find these engineers bitterly complaining that they keep the company together, but nobody ever listens to them. In my experience3, this is almost never true. 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. (One reason this is true is that all successful projects involve working with other people, and if nobody listens to you, you can’t do that.)
\nWhy do angry engineers believe they’re important? Paradoxically, anger can be really useful to a software engineer. Angry engineers are rarely the ones holding the company together, but they’re also rarely useless.
\nOne surprising thing about working for big tech companies is that some engineers are not just unproductive, but actively net-negative: either because they’re incapable of doing useful work on their own, or because they’re sloppy enough that they create more work than they do, or because they’re so checked out that they literally do nothing. Angry engineers might be net-negative in a cultural sense, but in terms of literally solving tickets and shipping features, they’re usually well above average.
\nWhy is this? Anger often comes from caring about your work, and caring a lot is sufficient to make you a competent engineer. I’ve never worked with someone who genuinely cared about their work who wasn’t (or didn’t eventually become) competent. I actually think it’s healthy for an early-career engineer to sometimes get angry about their work, because it means they care a lot: it’s still a mistake in the moment, but it’s a “good mistake”.
\nI certainly used to get angry — in fact, I wrote about the angriest I’ve ever been at work here4. But you have to move past it.
\nThink of “caring about your work” as a vertical tube, unsealed at either end. You fill the tube by pumping in emotional investment from the bottom5. 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.
\nOne solution is to try and care the exact right amount: be invested in work a bit, but also have hobbies and a family and whatever else gives you perspective about your work problems. If you have a rich and healthy personal life, it’s hard to find yourself yelling at somebody about React state management. However, this is a tricky balance to maintain over time.
\nAnother solution is to care about different things. The reason too much caring overflows into anger is because what you care about is misaligned with what the organization cares about. If your interests are perfectly aligned with your company’s (for instance, if you primarily care about delivering shareholder value), you can fit way more emotional investment into the tube before it overflows.
\nHere’s some dangerous advice: showing a little bit of anger at work can sometimes be useful. It can be a good way to signal that you care, or to build rapport with certain people, or to draw attention to something you think is important. However, it’s still always a mistake to be angry. You need to be able to drop back to a friendly mode at will, which is very difficult when you’re genuinely angry.
\nBeing able to show a full range of emotion at work is good. It makes you more persuasive and more human. Being a fully professional robot is fine — you can have a successful career this way — but there’s always going to be some kind of uncanny-valley HR-ness to your work persona that will make it hard to connect with your colleagues.
\nIf in doubt, don’t show anger. It’s never wrong to be professional. However, if you can signal that you’ve got enough distance to separate your professional feelings from your real feelings, and enough perspective to realize that the stakes of a technical decision are fundamentally not that high in the grand scheme of things, it can sometimes be okay to show visible frustration so that people know you’re still human.
\nWell-known software engineering personalities are often angry. It feels unfair to give too many negative examples, but obviously Linus Torvalds’ rants about Linux are a great example. Some of my favourite engineering talks are from Bryan Cantrill, who is sometimes visibly furious at his subject matter. There are too many well-known angry blog posts to list, but I’ll cite one I genuinely like: my Australian blogging colleague Nikhil’s post titled I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.
\nAnger is a part of the general image of a competent software engineer. Many junior engineers learn from this that it’s okay to be angry. However, taking your emotional cues from engineering celebrities is a big mistake, for a few reasons.
\nFirst, you are not Linus Torvalds or Bryan Cantrill. Torvalds is the BDFL of the most important software system in the world. Cantrill is the cofounder and CTO of his company. When these people are angry at work, people will not work around them, because they are the ones deciding what gets worked on. Once you’re the one in charge, you can get away with being emotional in the workplace6.
\nSecond, you don’t know what it’s like to work with these engineers. People give talks and write blog posts because they’re emotionally worked up about something. If your only exposure to a celebrity is via their conference talks and blog posts, you’re seeing them at something like their maximum emotional intensity. If you then take that level of emotion into your normal everyday work, you’re almost certainly overshooting.
\nI’ve been reorged into dysfunctional teams, have had projects I enjoyed cancelled, and have worked on systems that were extremely chaotic. I can’t remember the last time I was actually angry at work. To be clear, I’m not successfully hiding my anger (unless it’s so repressed it’s invisible to me as well)7. Nor am I naturally a chill person. I’ve just reached a point in my career where I genuinely don’t get upset about work stuff.
\nA cynical person might say here that I’ve stopped caring about my work, so of course I don’t get angry anymore. I’ve left the side of the “real engineers” — the Linus Torvalds and Bryan Cantrills of the world — and sold out for that sweet, sweet big tech money. I mean, maybe! It’s true that I’m less invested in specific technical decisions than I used to be. But I still care a lot about doing a good job, I still spend a lot of time tweaking and reading code, and I certainly get more done than I did when I was more emotionally volatile.
\nBeing angry at work feels good. It feels like proof that you’re working on something that matters, and that you’re personally having an impact. If you’re angry, nobody can call you a coaster. But anger is only a local maximum. If you can find your way to a different style of working, you’ll not only be more effective, but you’ll be in a far better place to have impact on problems that actually matter.
\nMostly, I fail.
\n↩\nAs I understand it, this is the work environment that most famously angry engineers came up in.
\n↩\nMy experience is certainly limited (a handful of companies, and maybe ten different teams or organizations). I can certainly believe it happens!
\n↩\nAbout halfway down, in the section titled “it’s not your manager’s fault”.
\n↩\nEmotional investment is a liquid with the viscosity of water.
\n↩\nTo a point. Even Torvalds famously said he’d gone too far with the anger and decided to turn it down a bit.
\n↩\nI suppose I’m not the best person to judge whether this is true. If you work with me and I do come across as an angry guy, please do tell me.
\n↩\nThis will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I’d like to share it (and my response) in full.
Here’s the email, from William Murray:
Hey Sean,
I have enjoyed your writing but your recent essays frustrate me.
You say that getting paid for deep thinking in software is coming to an end. You even admit that it makes you sad. But in the name of “usefulness” you refuse to rock the boat. The way I see it, if you are right there are only two reasonable responses, pursue other work or resist. You present your elegiac approach as mature / pragmatic / realistic. I’d call it complicit. You know when Willy Wonka says,
Continue reading...