## Metadata - Author: [[seangoedecke.com]] - Full Title:: You Should Never Be Angry at Work - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-should-never-be-angry-at-work/ - Read date:: [[2026-08-25]] ## Highlights > 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0vrt6t492ad5zwep7e0m8dp)) > Why is this? Anger often comes from caring about your work, and **caring a lot is sufficient to make you a competent engineer**. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0vr48yrdvy4e8pzvybetmth)) > Here’s some [dangerous advice](https://www.seangoedecke.com/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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0vr57faba250avpmffccgy1)) > 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 workplace[6](https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-should-never-be-angry-at-work/#fn-6). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0vrmf0pprcmbfb53hjcd2jn)) > 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0vrra48crrd87rn41t1arg3)) ## New highlights added [[2026-08-26]] > You can often find these engineers bitterly complaining that they keep the company together, but nobody ever listens to them. In my experience[3](https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-should-never-be-angry-at-work/#fn-3), 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.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0z6fmznq605avt9kmryhpv6))