You should never be angry at workI 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 .

Anger in the workplace

Anger 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.

If 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.

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. 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.

You 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.)

Caring

Why 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.

One 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.

Why 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”.

I 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 .

Moving past anger

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 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.

One 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.

Another 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.

A little bit of “professional anger”

Here’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.

Being able to show a full range of emotion at work is good. It makes you more persuasive and more...