GoKawiilAnger, 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 and anxiety, but not anger.
Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame. Right now, I find it reasonable to feel anxious about an uncertain future. Who knows what our professions will turn into and what kind of world my kids will find themselves in when they enter the workplace? And if you’ve been in the industry for a long time, will the skills you’ve spent years acquiring still matter?
But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing something to you.
Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And well at least someone at Meta wants that. Yet I also find that plenty of people in leadership positions express doubt about AI. They see that an increasing share of their costs is being funneled directly to some large AI labs. They express worries about what will happen to their data and whether these large companies will step into their space instead of being partners.
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. Even if you don’t find what’s happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting. We have access to magic machines, and we can poke at them and see what happens. The second way is to feel genuine excitement. Once you move beyond curiosity, you can come away with a newfound feeling of power and freedom. A lot of the gains from AI aren’t turning into productivity gains that are reflected in company profits but they’re showing up instead in the number of side projects shipped by everybody not on their company’s time.
The fact that this is happening shows us that owners and founders don’t necessarily know what will happen. Ownership comes with agency, but it does not provide foresight, and this change is disorienting for everybody. I engage with plenty of people who project confidence in public and are much less certain in private. Many of them are placing bets, but they are talking with confidence about those bets, trying to stay afloat while the ground moves under them. They experience that uncertainty from a position where they can act on it, and they are often standing somewhere with a megaphone to get others on their side to increase their odds.
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