Sean Goedecke wrote a good essay called You Should Never Be Angry at Work. The strategic core is right, and I agree with most of it. But there’s a gap in it that I keep running into, and I think it’s worth naming: the advice assumes anger is a choice. For a lot of us, it isn’t.
Let me start with the parts I agree with, because they’re genuinely good.
The “networks route around damage” framing is the most useful thing in the essay. An angry colleague becomes a problem to be managed, not a professional helping you manage problems. And it’s a self-reinforcing spiral: angry engineers get left out of decisions, which makes them angrier, which pushes them further from the spaces where decisions happen.
