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.
Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
31–40 of 203 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#32A 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.
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 …
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#33Definitely, a coworker asked me some time ago what I was frowned up on only to answer him I was just focused
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#34If your brain is not operating in the same mode used for hunting animals, are you even in flow?
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#35Yes, absolutely, I do, and not just when writing code. I used to work on retail self-service kiosks, and I'd sometimes have to work in the hardware lab around the QA engineers, who for some reason at this company tended to be very perky, gregarious extraverts. They'd see me in there chasing down a bug on one of the kiosks, and invariably they'd ask what's wrong or tell me to cheer up or ask if maybe I'd heard something about the latest round of layoffs.
I do it when I play guitar or piano, too. I've had people ask me why I'm angry when I'm playing. My mom did it, too, when she played play piano.
I just figure it's because I'm focusing so hard on what I'm doing that I stop concentrating on my expression.
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#36I have total resting bitch face, folks sometimes ask what in the meeting made me so mad. Really annoying.
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”.
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#37Can relate, even at uni people told me I look unapproachable but it's just the concentration face (I want to believe).
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#38I 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’…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#39When I was in second grade, which per my timeline, was many years before anyone had access to "a computer" outside of a college lab, I recall doing some kind of arts and crafts thing, or fixing a pen, or something, and I channeled a bit of my dad's energy and got very focused on this task. In second grade, it was before they shuttled me off to the gifted and talented program with other "smart kids" so the other kids sort of looked on me as an unusual weirdo, pretty standard stuff, but anyway, this girl that was watching me do whatever it was said, "you look angry", and I realized that channeling my dad's "let's fix this" energy did specifically include some facial contortion that pretty much looked like anger.
nowadays I'm very often a flaming angry coder but that's real anger. It feels the same as when you get angry to press the fire button really fast in a video game, kind of thing. It's been a major issue for decades now as if there are any other people around, I have to really watch my mannerisms and mumblings because there have been negative outcomes from it.
I've also sprinted with other devs who do the same thing. Plus I think it occurs in other fields, like my old drum teacher when I watch him in videos, when he's going for some dramatic drum thing, his face turns to total anger and it is definitely some kind of visceral animal thing you tap into when trying to succeed in a tight space.
Re: Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?
#40I look angry all the time, they call it "resting bitch face"