People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.
(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)
I also have a very, "The world's gonna do what the world's gonna do, the best I can do is find my path through and flow with it," attitude about, well... most things. Maybe that helps? Maybe I'm talking out of my ass rn? I'm unsure! :)
Few people have anything that comes anywhere near any sort of philosophical foundation that they can rely on to weather their anxieties. If anything they only strengthen their sensibility to express—and compound—their worries.
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).
After spending the last year in and out or rehab, and intensive outpatient dealing primarily with alcohol addiction, I've been told by many different people that anger is the emotion, its unhealthy to just ignore it. That's one of many things (anxiety for me) that keeps people in active addiction. Your statement is close to my belief and experience, except that Anger IS an emotion and all emotions are neutral, neither good or bad. Its how you respond to the emotion that can become the problem, weather its violence, drugs or any other harmful activity. Processing any emotion in a healthy way and being able to understand the reasons you feeling the emotion is the gamechanger. Speaking only from my own experience.
I spent the first ten years, in an almost constant state of anger. Giving it up, was almost as difficult as giving up other stuff, but it was definitely a watershed in my life.
However, I think that's all I'll say on the topic. These types of discussions are always best done in small groups, not in public, on a tech forum.
I sincerely wish you good luck!
Yes, this is a school of thought I've seen in a few communication circles. It's not entirely accurate, but it's a useful exercise. They teach that anger is really a derived emotion, and is a result of a fundamental emotion, coupled with a narrative in your mind. The fundamental emotion is the real one, and the narrative in your mind maybe inaccurate. As a result, when you're angry, examine that narrative and ask: "Is this the only narrative that fits the data points?"
There have been occasions where I felt instant anger as a result of a stimulus, and there really wasn't a narrative behind it.
But those are the exceptions. In well over 95% of the cases, it is a derived emotion.
Related: A lot of people really seem hardwired to blame. When something goes wrong (at work, in their life, wherever), they seem to be incomplete if they can't find someone to blame. They often refuse to accept that "Accidents can happen."
Separating the act of "solving a problem" from the act of "blaming someone" was something I learned early in my career. It's useful to know which people you work with are those who can't distinguish.
Pro tip: Never work for a manager whose first question when something goes wrong is "Who owns this?" It's OK to get there eventually, but not the first impulse.
I worked for a company that this was never asked, because we already knew.
Every task/bug/feature had an "owner," before any work was done on it. We had this insane JIRA ticket workflow that was designed to force someone to be in charge of every item. You couldn't just put something down, and walk away.
It was a pain, but when problems happened, there was never a "blame game." We would just figure out if there was a root cause. If it was someone's mistake, they might be made responsible for fixing it, but if we felt they were in over their head, we'd pitch in, and help. Everyone was always responsible for rolling up their sleeves.
People who pointed fingers, did not do well. People who broke stuff, seldom suffered, unless it was a habit, but people who fixed stuff (including stepping up, and taking the rap) would get kudos.
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
I felt this way very recently about the one projects I am focusing on. I kept seeing others explore the same space already ahead of me. I thought I'll never make it here because why use my thing when you can already use those things?
There was this extreme sense of urgency, as if I needed to do nothing else in my life but finish this project and get it out there. One day it hit me, and then over the course of a few weeks it settled in, that I was thinking of this from a place of extrinsic motivation. Basically, I was not doing what I wanted, I was doing what I thought others would want from me.
The project now has only two goals.
1. Build the project I want to use for myself, but in a way that will benefit others who happen to want the same thing.
2. The outcome of the project is not the code/app, it's a "changed Me", having learned everything I needed to to build the project.
Eventually I want the project to have a hosted paid platform version. I am not making this platform because I want to make money (I do, but that's besides the point). I am making this platform because I want experience in doing the types of things that can make money.
The whole thing now has become internally oriented in a way that allows me to no longer feel time pressure or be outcome oriented.
I went from feeling burned out spending all my time on this (I shed all other hobbies and activities), to having a great time spending all my time on this. The same amount of time/effort now feels indefinitely sustainable.
Framing is really one of the most powerful methods of emotional regulation. Whatever you are doing, make it relaxed and fun!
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
That's what's frustrating.
Never Be Angry at Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396811 - Aug 2026 (14 comments)
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CHLavYHn-BG/?hl=en
Duration - how long will things take?
Path - how will we get there?
Outcome - what's at the end, or how I think of it, what does done look like or where do I want to be?
Things like anger and anxiety are IMO, when our brains take an unfortunate offramp instead of solving for these. I've used this as a analytical framework to calm myself and make a plan to get out of a jam many times: physical pain, pressure-cooker work stress, interpersonal conflicts.
I have also had significant success using it as mini-framework to help break down problems people have come to me with. There's a lot to emotions in general far beyond "psychologists HATE this one trick" - don't let me oversell it, but it immediately came to mind reading the article.
However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.
In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.
From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.
Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.
If you make a statement like that, I will have to ask you to reread the article. He's clear in saying:
1. Anger and anxiety should not be conflated.
2. Anxiety is OK.
> You can’t control your emotions like that.
The thesis (by him and other sources I've read) is that anger is an emotion that you do create (most of the time). It's a result of a narrative coupled with another emotion (anxiety in this case). You can't control the anxiety. You can control the narrative in your brain. With certain narratives, you get anger. With others, you don't.
I've known many who've made that journey. It seems the author has as well.
Now if your argument is that it's OK to be angry (you've made the narrative clear in your comment), I won't disagree.
> [...]
> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.
With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.
It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.
So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.
That’s really the thing. If you understand how badly a few people are accumulating resources and power through the build up of AI, with the very explicit goal to make most people’s life worse, you have to be angry. Its a rational reaction. It doesn’t have to be tamed through an analytical process
It reminds me of (for the pedants out there, I'm not saying it's equivalent to) the consume product meme. "Don't ask questions, just complete assignment and then get excited for next industry trend."
>I don’t know what the future of this industry will look like, and I don’t know who will benefit from it and I don’t think I’m alone with that. However I can only urge anyone who feels anger and looks for a villain right to instead remain curious instead. To be curious enough to understand what is changing, excited enough to experiment with it. And then, from what we learn, earn the right to decide when resistance is warranted and where to direct it.
Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.
I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).
Perhaps this would be far more exciting if I were younger. But right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can survive.
I find it great for experiments to throw away but I wish everyone remembered step 2 more often.
The end result for me has been that I am now a gatekeeper trying to prevent AI slop making its way into systems which I care about, and failing, and getting dragged into meetings with my boss about how my performance has gone down now that I'm chained to this stupid thing and forced to use it for even the most trivial tasks.
I haven't been this upset with PayPal mafia overlords since crypto.
Those problems are much worse in languages other than English, by the way. I'm not a native speaker but I always interact with LLMs in English because their prose in Italian is terrible, it often reads as though the text had been written in English and then translated.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with each of those stylistic elements in abstract, exactly like there's nothing wrong with em-dashes or the word "absolutely", but I would argue that writing well means choosing styles that match the content; what LLMs appear to be doing instead is forcing the message into a default pattern, which we percieve as forced and therefore tend to dislike.
To be clear: their writing is fine. The primary goal of writing is to convey meaning, and LLMs have been perfectly adequate at that pretty much from day one. I can get over their quirks.
The bar I set was "significantly higher quality than the median literate native speaker".
The bar you're setting is expert use of metaphors, restrained use of bullets and tables and parataxis, proper emphasis, and avoiding dense technical prose.
I suspect you have a higher opinion of the median literate speaker than is warranted.
It is worse because it fails to communicate information well. When I say it can barely speak English, I mean that it produces sentences which are incomprehensible on the first few reads. I have never found the median literate native speaker to be so difficult to understand, partly because they use a limited vocabulary and avoid waffle.
It can barely speak English in a new and exciting way, one unlike all the previous humans who could barely speak English.
Most people write quite badly!
Over time, I suspect both human and AI writing will 'converge'. Humans are good at adopting/imitating language from a variety of sources, so I won't be surprised when we start using "load-bearing" in conversation. Simultaneously, LLMs will start sounding more natural.
There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.
"Electronic drudgery" is how I earn my income which pays for my food and shelter. That's why I'm not excited.
This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.
>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?
The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.
You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.
Tell us what we can do against the mindless slop! DDoS Anthropic?
I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying
When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.
In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat
And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.
So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.
Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.
I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult
So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.
I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water
Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform.
Now? Its all gas no brakes. Just shove AI into everything. No vetting, no testing, just shove it into everything and see what happens. This is not software development to me - this is sprinting towards a brick wall.
I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy. Talk to people about your skills and see if what else is out there. Look at going into adjacent fields, etc. When I went through the first dot com bust and then the 08' crash? The only thing that saved me was networking. I had a few friends that I was talking to who were getting me interviews and telling me about openings that weren't being published.
Keep your shoulder to the wind and keep pushing, there's light at the end of this, I just don't know how long the tunnel is.
> I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy
I have been very bad at making friends and networking throughout my life, but it's something I'm working on. Appreciate the clarity that I am probably doing the right thing
I have pretty similar feelings to what you are going through.
I was so stressed like seven or eight months ago that for two weeks I was constantly sleep deprived. Then I just asked myself "What is the worst that can happen?" The answer helped me relax a bit. I will just move to some small village somewhere, open a shop for anything and get by. Life will go on.
I seriously think software is / was hard. That means people that thrived in it were smart and disciplined.
And which other profession has so much change? My father is a civil engineer. The tools and formulas he uses has not changed in 50 years while I have to pick up whatever hype tech is asked of me. Many people are similar to me. So we are very adaptable in my most honest opinion.
If it comes to _worst of it_, smart and adaptable people is where I would put my bet on being able to find their footing in the new world.
Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.
Like this author who is invested in AI.