A lot of recent digital ink has been spilled about the implications of Mark Zuckerberg's recent changes to Meta's corporate culture, to reflect a more "Masculine Energy" that he believes is necessary to succeed1. The article that spurred this post, though, is this one by Kelley Greene2 on how aggression in the workplace plays out in practice. It's worth reading.

I spent a lot of years at AWS, joining in my early 30s. AWS's culture is famously combative; it's one of the defining traits, to such an extent that being argumentative (up to a point, which is a nuance often ignored or elided) is one of the core leadership principles of the company. I fit in really well there; I am, naturally, inclined to react intensely with aggressive language when challenged, and to approach disagreements with maximum intensity to steamroll opposition. 12 years in that culture, though, actually softened me in ways that I never expected.

One of my biggest points of pride when I left was that I left behind me a community of Python developers that prized helpfulness and assistance. I won't say it was ideal -- I always had a hard time responding to people who hadn't done the work themselves, coming in and asking questions that had long been answered -- but I truly believe that leaning into helping, instead of fighting, made that part of Amazon a better place. As I transition my career to GitHub, I have chosen to lean further into that approach.

People who I work with today have told me that they respect my empathy and willingness to listen to them, not traits I associated with myself in the past. I don't know that I feel any different in that regard, but I have chosen to moderate my aggressive impulses in most conversations, because it works better that way; people respond much better to helping hands than they do to angry words, even when there's a disagreement. I am better able to convince people to approach things the way I believe they should when I help them than I am when I browbeat them.

"Masculine energy", taken purely as "aggressive behaviour", did not work as well for me as this. I am categorically "masculine"; I don't doubt my own gender at all, and I just don't see my new approach as any less "masculine"... just as better.

  1. USA Today, The Guardian, The Cut, CBC, etc... ↩︎
  2. Find her at https://kelleygreene.pizza/ for more ↩︎