Actually, both.

You should grow a thick skin, as most places where you can learn the most about big scale tech (ie. tech giants) will have rude bosses. Right now we canʼt do much about it; if you work there, you need to be tough.

However, when you leave such a company to start or join a startup, you should remember all the bad things, become gentle and mellow, and keep that attitude during and after the growth phase.

My thick skin i grew during my tech giant days helps me a lot when our startup starts working with big companies as i learned how to communicate with such bosses (i intentionally not writing “leaders” here). Meanwhile, with our employees we try to be as gentle as possible, while still keeping the (often short) deadlines. Behaving this way makes our employees more enthusiastic about their work. They tend to do a better job, as they actually care about the code they write.

Learn and apply toughness when you must. But put an example before others by being a good leader instead of a pushy or rude boss.

I do not agree on taking a single stand of either being rude/tough or soft. I think, the stand should be situational. One medicine may(will) not work always unless it is so much into culture that, things has to work in that way. In Computer Industry(Software to be specific), this balance is essential, I think.

people should grow a thick skin if they plan to work in the computer industry.

May be yes, for the folks having direct Customer Interactions. You got to be, at times. But if I see from the Internal Management layers, you may not have to be. In fact people should be grown in a culture where they can both justify and give back the Push that is top-down.

Pushing, Yelling are part and parcel of it but, surely should not be 'the' thing.

Being rude towards your employees does not make them grow into better engineers.

I've seen great teams do amazing things because of the culture of being open and supportive. People were willing to collaborate and it was easy to do projects where multiple teams had to work together in order to achieve something.

I've also seen great teams fall apart because of miscommunication, ego issues of the team leads/managers/C-suite. This type of behavior drove away several senior developers.

So, I'd say no, people shouldn't grow a thick skin, they should learn how to communicate and collaborate, regardless of the position they're in.

Also, if you can't change the company culture, you can always find another company with a better engineering culture.

It's probably culture-dependent and I'm not American.

Being 'pushy' or 'tough' sounds nicer, but it's different from shouting and throwing tantrums, which seems to be the case from the descriptions.

Pushing employees to excel, if you're careful to be reasonable and push in the right direction, could be okay.

Throwing tauntrums just seems unprofessional to me, and seems like it will make people quit, especially the ones who actually have social skills.