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Comment by will4274 | Hacker News Reader

> rage outbursts, screaming during work hours

I've been working as a software engineer at a big corp for four years, I've never even heard anybody shout, or anything that could be considered a rage outburst. Sometimes the volume goes up a little in meetings. I've heard of one or two people yelling through the grapevine, but I didn't personally observe it. In general, I don't think shouting has any place in a workplace. However, I also wouldn't fire somebody immediately for shouting once - a conversation with their manager and recommendation to take a few days off to unwind is a reasonable reaction to a single incident.

> Inappropriate emails

Can you be a bit more specific? My workplace sees a fair number of testy emails "X is totally fucking wrong" / "X totally shouldn't have been done without consulting me" but from experience, peoples perception of what an inappropriate email is varies widely.

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I completely agree with your first point. We don't really have reports of people shouting with each other outside of engineering, and that's why people don't really know what to about that.

> Can you be a bit more specific?

Testy is a good adjective for them. One of the worst contained profanities, but was sent using personal e-mail accounts (but it was sent from work and was about work).

There were some company-wide e-mails with thinly veiled criticism and passive-aggressive remarks regarding the (bad) work of other engineerings teams. People pointing fingers and trying to assign blame.

> personal e-mail accounts

That's a bit surprising. A lot of the things you're saying (shouting, using personal email for work, rage emails) should only happen once per person maximum. When it happens, a calm conversation with a manager should explain that this behavior is detrimental to the success of the company. If it keeps happening, people need to go. Set the standard to separate the bad apples from the batch and then remove the bad apples.

> thinly veiled criticism and passive-aggressive remarks

Unfortunately, this is the life sometimes. It should be discouraged. But, these are probably symptoms of work related problems (lack of expertise, lack of clear responsibilities, managers who escalate rather than de-escalate situations) rather than pure conduct problems. Solving them requires patience and working the problem.

> A lot of the things you're saying (shouting, using personal email for work, rage emails) should only happen once per person maximum.

Indeed. Problem is, HR is desperate because everyone is engaging in such behavior. Which makes the rest of the company to think that it is a systemic rather than an individual problem.

> But, these are probably symptoms of work related problems (lack of expertise, lack of clear responsibilities, managers who escalate rather than de-escalate situations) rather than pure conduct problems.

Thanks for that. Indeed, those things might be the root causes of the problems the teams are facing.

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