Anger, Anxiety and Agency | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

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Anger, Anxiety and Agency

written on August 24, 2026

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at<br>work — a post<br>with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at<br>work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the<br>people around you, many of whom have no more power over the source of your anger<br>than you do. I did learn that lesson, but it did not come naturally. One thing<br>in particular that I learned is that in a company there is a shared vision, and<br>if you don’t agree with it and are not in a position to change it, you should<br>not start a mutiny, not even a small-scale one. Nothing good comes from that.

In the discussion around that topic, one of the most upvoted comments on the<br>Lobsters thread<br>asked a question I had to think about quite a bit:

How can you work in tech right now and not be angry?

In the context of the thread, this was clearly also about AI and agents. For<br>me, the emotions I would expect in tech vis-a-vis these new developments are<br>disorientation and anxiety, but not anger.

Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame. Right now, I find it<br>reasonable to feel anxious about an uncertain future. Who knows what our<br>professions will turn into and what kind of world my kids will find themselves<br>in when they enter the workplace? And if you’ve been in the industry for a long<br>time, will the skills you’ve spent years acquiring still matter?

But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed<br>somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing<br>something to you.

Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One<br>narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity<br>gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And<br>well at least someone at Meta<br>wants<br>that.<br>Yet I also find that plenty of people in leadership positions express doubt<br>about AI. They see that an increasing share of their costs is being funneled<br>directly to some large AI labs. They express worries about what will happen to<br>their data and whether these large companies will step into their space instead<br>of being partners.

My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no<br>way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you<br>can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive<br>emotional state because it can lead to curiosity. Even if you don’t find what’s<br>happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting. We have<br>access to magic machines, and we can poke at them and see what happens. The<br>second way is to feel genuine excitement. Once you move beyond curiosity, you<br>can come away with a newfound feeling of power and freedom. A lot of the gains<br>from AI aren’t turning into productivity gains that are reflected in company<br>profits but they’re showing up instead in the number of side projects shipped by<br>everybody not on their company’s time.

The fact that this is happening shows us that owners and founders don’t<br>necessarily know what will happen. Ownership comes with agency, but it does not<br>provide foresight, and this change is disorienting for everybody. I engage with<br>plenty of people who project confidence in public and are much less certain in<br>private. Many of them are placing bets, but they are talking with confidence<br>about those bets, trying to stay afloat while the ground moves under them. They<br>experience that uncertainty from a position where they can act on it, and they<br>are often standing somewhere with a speakerphone to get others on their side to<br>increase their odds.

I feel that contradiction myself. I am simultaneously tremendously excited, but<br>I am also unsure what will happen next. I do not know what it will mean to be a<br>programmer in the future, and, as the owner of a company, I am also not sure<br>where the high ground will be when this all settles. Much of what I learned<br>over the years is changing rapidly, including ideas I considered fundamental to<br>my craft and business. Some days that feels liberating, but on others I wake up<br>feeling like the ground is crumbling beneath me.

Anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion because it acknowledges that you do not know<br>what will happen and might not be able to stop it. On the other hand, anger can<br>feel more actionable because, instead of saying "I don’t know," you already have<br>someone to blame. It turns a loss of control into a comforting story with a<br>villain. But I feel that particularly when it comes to AI, it’s easy to pick<br>the wrong villain because of how disruptive the change is for everyone. Your<br>engineering manager or leadership team might themselves feel uncertain about<br>their future and just try to bolster their own confidence by projecting...