Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have no more power over the source of your anger than you do. I did learn that lesson, but it did not come naturally. One thing in particular that I learned is that in a company there is a shared vision, and if you don’t agree with it and are not in a position to change it, you should 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 Lobsters thread 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 me, the emotions I would expect in tech vis-a-vis these new developments are disorientation…