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Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?

211 points by thrownoldoutit ↗ HN
So people have always told me I look angry when I'm focusing, and I figured "Yeah I look like every other engineer when they're focusing".

Today a friend walked by a cafe where I was working. He saw me, sent a pic and asked me if everything was OK. I looked furious, which I don't understand, because I was being super productive and am a reasonably happy person.

Who else looks like they're going to war, when they're writing code?

202 comments

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h2odragon
Yo.

The more enthused I am about things the more scary I am to other mammals, apparently. Don't have any real advice to offer: I deal with it by working alone.

onion2k
Yes, but only because I am angry.
hef19898
Either that, or frustrated. I can realy relate to the Baum guy from The Big Short, if I am curious I am not angry and / or frustrated.
chaorace
There's no more productive morning than an angry morning. It's great fuel for tackling the email backlog... albeit sometimes with mixed results.
rikkipitt
It has been said of me too, on a few occasions! Resting concentration face.
ergonaught
Yes, apparently, according to several people. Doesn't seem to occur with some forms of concentration (ex: reading fiction).
Hamuko
I know that I at least sound angry.
revskill
I think it's not related (Angry vs Focus).

Being angry while coding means you're using the wrong tech stack i think. Fix that.

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jrootabega
Yes, I was once interrupted by a co-worker while I was working, and he just said "Smile." Part of working in the panopticon.
_jal
The only reasonable response is aggression. Any asshole who does that deserves it.
jrootabega
I think the act was wrong, but the person was someone I otherwise respected and got along with. This is one of the things that the culture does to people when you pack them in like sardines. It's not natural to be looking at someone all day and not have an urge to just say something to them. If you manage to resist the urge, or worse, signal that your focus has value to you, you start to get branded as unfriendly. It's emotional boot camp to break down your individual identity.
lostlogin
Males saying this to females is very much a thing. Particularly older males to younger females.
mcluck
Yes. For some reason my concentration face looks like a rage face
jzm2k
I have probably looked angry while working because people tell me I look angry in general, probably more so when I'm in focused but it has never stopped anyone from interrupting me while I'm working.

Also mandatory Seinfeld reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kafq7yrKAOQ

thfuran
>but it has never stopped anyone from interrupting me while I'm working

Are you sure?

aliqot
Yes, I'm angry. Stop staring at me asking if I'm okay. I'm commanding lightning to do my bidding.
karmajunkie
> I'm commanding lightning to do my bidding.

My daughter asked me what I do at work all day last night, and I told her I push a lot of buttons, which (predictably) led to 1000 questions about what buttons, what order, why, etc. From now on I'm just going to say this. :)

wanderingstan
I was inspired by a friend who saved hundreds of Webcam selfies of himself at half hour intervals. The face.com API classified the majority as “sad” or “angry”.

Mentioned in my Quantified Self talk here at 1m 15s: https://vimeo.com/42239564#t=1m15s

This led to the development of LifeSlice, which lets anyone do the same, and I now have s as decade of 30-min periodic selfies. Not sure what I’ll do with them all but it’s interesting to see myself age. :)

I don’t look angry, but can confirm that I’m at best expressionless when concentrating at the computer.

http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/

davidthewatson
My favorite part about this is that it captures pandiculation:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21665102/#:~:text=Pandiculat....

And makes me wonder whether a simple computer vision algorithm could classify frequency of pandiculation in the work and we could begin making correlations between pandiculation and perception of mood valence.

sillysaurusx
Text anchors only work on chrome desktop fyi. It sucks. I once spent all night making a cool lisp tutorial based on text anchors, then realized 80% of the world won’t see it since that’s the percentage of mobile traffic.
JimDabell
It works on Safari / Mobile Safari from 16.1 onwards (the latest version).
sillysaurusx
Oh, finally. Thanks for pointing that out. Indeed I haven’t updated iOS in awhile.

Guess I’ll ship that lisp tutorial then.

Beldin
It works for me on Chrome Android. Not even running the latest version, so it's probably working for a while already.
yencabulator
> I once spent all night making a cool lisp tutorial based on text anchors, then realized 80% of the world won’t see it since that’s the percentage of mobile traffic.

It's just a URL anchor syntax for when there's no applicable id attribute, you could recognize the syntax in Javascript and implement a "polyfill" on-page.

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segmondy
hmm, I had a script that took webcam selfie every minute for a year. I never thought to classify it till now. thanks, I'm going to make it again.
rozenmd
I have total resting bitch face, folks sometimes ask what in the meeting made me so mad. Really annoying.
bombcar
Reminds me of a (Wodehouse I think) short story where a young man is told by his doctor to smile more and every time he does it anyone who is looking at him thinks that the smiler knows his dark secrets - resulting in all sorts of promotions and other good things, which he attributes to being “nicer”.
ultim8k
Same when I play videogames.
volleygman180
Agreed. It's probably the worst when I'm playing Super Smash Bros.
dorkwood
A coworker once walked around to my side of the desk to see what I was looking at on my screen. It was just some code that I'd written. They were surprised, and said it looked like I was staring at a picture of something truly disgusting.
bombcar
I mean I don’t want to insult your code but I’ve certainly looked at my code and it has been a picture of something truly disgusting.

I fear that some of my C code would get me up against The Hague for war crimes …

wil421
"Who wrote this disgusting monstrosity?" Looks at the commit from months earlier and sees my own username...
cletus
Mandatory Seinfeld reference [1]. Honestly, this is good advice. So much of work is actually just perception management. Looking annoyed or angry without actually being mean or inconsiderate is a bit of a cheat code.

Beyond perception management there's the issue of avoiding unnecessary interruptions. It can be hard to define what's necesary and what isn't. Rarely does it have anything to do with what someone is interrupting you for but instead, it is (once again) it's perception management.

There is a context-switching contest that comes from being interrupted and it can be hard to get back in the zone. So you want to avoid people interrupting you to ask something that would quite literally be the first link on a trivial Google search.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kafq7yrKAOQ

wara23arish
I have noticed this since joining a new team this year. There is one person on my team who is always annoyed and complaining about something but really they just dont get anything done. There are various times I had to work with them, and when there are no blockers whatsoever they wont do shit.

I would love to be able to say “do something about it” when they goes on their rants but american culture is too polite. Most of their contributions to team meetings is “docked has this new thing that could be helpful” and various other name-drops. Idk if the rest of the ppl are fooled or its just a thing we put up with.

sublinear
Sounds like you should move over to Docker :p
wara23arish
HA, the latest namedrop was “I attended github universe, they’re working on a lot of CiCD stuff that can be helpful “

I think americans are just high trust society so they’re not usually skeptical of people. Im skeptical of myself much less other ppl :D

badcppdev
I remember working with a team where a new starter had joined and although he talked a lot in meetings I wasn't sure what he was contributing. I checked the code commits and he had committed 2 things in a couple of months.

It wasn't my team so I didn't cause a fuss but from that point onwards I made sure that he wasn't on the critical path for anything I cared about.

In hindsight the mismanagement on that team probably led to the exit 5 years later being $100-200 million lower than it could have been. But the company was super stingy with shares so I'm not sure it would have been worth my time rocking the boat.

In other hindsight I might have realised why I look angry while I'm at work.

nixpulvis
Yes, anger fuels my thirst for blood. While I'm hunting down a bug or digging into a design decision's history. It's not rage (usually), it's more like a mixture of frustration and curiosity. Bewildered and tempting. It's almost as if I'm being teased, but I know there's actually a good reason, somewhere.

Common lines:

"What the actual fuck!?" "Are you serious!?" slams both hands on keyboard "Uuummmmmmmmm..." "Whyyyyyyyy"

Then you lean into the monitor and continue searching.

beaviskhan
Yes, and if you interrupt me to ask me if I'm angry, then I'm going to both look like I'm angry and actually be angry. Leave me alone, I have work to do! :p
fisherjeff
Of course I look angry – I work with computers all day
bena
I think people can't differentiate between concentration and anger.
nasir
When the eyebrows get closer, the pathways for neurons are cleared out and information flows easier. Of course, the consequence of that is you look angry.

ok I made it up.

lucretian
oh, like a series of tubes. i've heard of those before.
kemiller2002
I used to. It was an subconscious reflection of my personal life. Things changed, and I changed. It's probably not the same for everyone, but that was it for me. Work is much less tiring now.
rozularen
Definitely, a coworker asked me some time ago what I was frowned up on only to answer him I was just focused