# I fail Published articles for I fail. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## You should never be angry at work DevFeed: [You should never be angry at work]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Published: 2026-08-22T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Sean Goedecke]() Topics: [decision-making](), [Software]() Tags: [advice](), [decision-making](), [i-fail](), [management](), [slack](), [software-engineer](), [team](), [work]() ### AI overview This opinion argues that anger at work harms collaboration and makes software engineers less effective. It describes how visibly angry or emotionally unreliable engineers can intimidate colleagues, become excluded from important conversations, and be bypassed in workplace decision-making. ### Source excerpt I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you're shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn't really matter how you've accomplished it. However, there's one thing that I do think is solid advice: you should never be angry at work. Anger in the workplace Anger in the workplace is toxic. An angry colleague immediately becomes a new problem to be managed, not a professional helping you manage problems. When someone is visibly angry in a meeting or in Slack, it kills the entire atmosphere: other engineers will often go quiet entirely, not wanting to make the situation worse. If you routinely "get heated" at work, the best-case scenario is that you're part of a tight-knit team of confident people who aren't put off by it2. No harm, no foul. But the second someone comes onto your team who's not so confident, or you have to communicate outside of your team, it becomes a big problem. It's a bad way to treat your colleagues -- even undirected or casual anger intimidates and alienates the people around you3 -- and it makes you a less effective engineer. 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. You can often find these engineers bitterly complaining that they keep the company together, but nobody ever listens to them. In my experience4, 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