You Should Never Be Angry at Work — Unless Your Brain Doesn't Give You a Choice

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 strategy is sound

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.

Work on 🤖d34D pIx315☠️

You Should Never Be Angry at Work — Unless Your Brain Doesn't Give You a Choice

The strategy is sound