Nah, it’s okay to be angry. It’s not okay to express that anger as hostility.

This is valid not only for engineers. Possibly for all work situations.
A lesson I too had to learn the hard way.

OTOH expressing anger in your life must be possible. Maybe it's possible to do that constructively.

I don't regret the times I show anger at work, but it's a definitely a fine line that can leave me feeling a bit uneasy afterwards. It's one of the "social capital" things; you need to earn enough good will to spend your anger on the battles that really matter to you.

I used to care more about work. But this job pays garbage and is frothing over AI, so fuck them.

Hating on Jira and Confluence together is a great team bonding experience.

tell this to my fucking manager LMAO

When I get genuinely frustrated and irritated, when I communicate that it's typically still with a smile. Dark humor, if you will. I'm mostly thinking of team-external factors, though.

Within team, it's mainly about one specific colleague's work. I've voiced issues and frustrations, to them, teammates, and HR. Nothing fundamentally helped, though. By now, I try to act and think in damage-control mode. To not waste too much time and effort or mental capacity on their work. Still a waste to go through review iterations you feel are useless and wasteful, that they should have noticed and solved beforehand on their own.

Only once have I used harsh, blunt wording in an email to an admin after prod was down yet again, and there was no upfront or at any point communication regarding that they made some changes. It didn't have a lasting (negative) effect, at least.

In my previous job, if I was angry, it wasn't at my colleagues. It was at upper management. My colleagues were in the trenches with me. We suffered together. Being angry at work isn't bad in itself, imo. I did use that anger as motivation to get another job. I felt incredibly lucky to do so, however.

Flips table

Yeah there's no need to get angry. It's just a job. If it doesn't work without anger you can always get another one (or probably most people here can anyway).