In IT (and life) it’s inevitable that you’ll encounter things that suck. This might be a process within the company, another person in the organization or it might even be the squeeky chair you sit on. So things sometimes suck and the easiest thing to do is complain, but this doesn’t solve the issue. But what else can you do? I often try to tackle them in three steps: change it, if that doesn’t work accept it and if that doesn’t work leave. I’m not a self help guru and I don’t want to go that way, but this method works for me. So maybe it also work for other people. In this post I’ll dive more into what the steps mean and how I apply them.

But I could complain…

Complaining is easy, right? I think everyone does it every day and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a form of stress relieve and sometimes just telling it to someone else lifts the pressure a bit. Unfortunately in most cases it doesn’t solve the thing that sucks. Maybe it goes away by itself, maybe it doesn’t. In either case if it really bothers you and you don’t want to leave it to luck, it’s up to you to do something about it.

Of course you shouldn’t dive on every issue you see and apply the steps, but I think it really helps for those things that you’ve been complaining about (almost) daily for some time. It’s sometimes easy to spot the complaining of others, because it could be really annoying. It’s harder to spot this of yourself, I often find it difficult to spot for myself. For me it works to try and recognize a pattern: I also complained about this yesterday and the day before, actually last week too, so it’s really bothering me and not solving itself. Let’s do something about this!

Change

The first thing you can do is to try to change things so it doesn’t suck anymore. There’s many ways to do this and with bigger things it’s harder to start. The most important thing is to at least try and maybe, just maybe you can change it. It’s hard to give any specific tips on how to change it, because the cause of the issue can be really broad. In general I think people in IT are natural problem solvers, since it’s what they are hired to do. A lot of times it’s not the question whether they can do it, but whether they try.

Let’s take a look at an example. There’s this process within your company which takes three months to go through and it really hinders you (and your team) to deliver features for customers. Other teammates complain about it every time, but when asking around no one actually gave it a good try to change it. Why not give it a try yourself to change it? There’s different ways to do this, for example you can automate the process on your end or you can try to change the part of the organization responsible for the process. You could do this by showing the pain the process gives you and how it hinders your team from delivering value for the organization. The team responsible for the process maybe never realized this and you could even help them to speed up the process.

Still there comes a point where you could be stuck. Maybe you can’t find the source of the issue, the resources (money, people, time) are too limited for the issue or the problem is not big enough for other parts of the organization. You can go too far in trying to change things, this is when the next step can be taken.

Accept

Sometimes problems are problems and there’s nothing to change to make it go away. I think it’s an illusion anyway that there will never be a problem, but it’s more about prioritizing the problems. Try to focus on the problems which give the most pain or lose the most money or time. After comparing your problem with other problems and reassess the situation, you might come to the conclusion that it’s best to just accept the problem.

For me it’s still important to at least have followed the order of the steps: before accepting a problem I should at least have tried to change it. It’s easy to just accept a thing that sucks and be guided by fate, but you get further by taking control in your own hands. Still I found out that I can’t solve every problem. If I can’t change the problem and I also can’t accept it, there’s a final step that can be taken.

Leave

This is the emergency brake and is the final step that can be taken: leave the thing that sucks. It feels a bit bad to leave it unsolved, but sometimes it’s the best for you. For myself this step always feels bad, since I couldn’t change it and I just ran from my problem. Still, in hindsight often I’m happy with my decision and can live with it since I gave it my all to change it and accept it.

Here it’s also important to go through the steps. It’s easy to just leave everything that sucks, but than what could you add to yourself, others and the organization you’re in? Also it’s easy to just accept a problem, but this may hide the problem for other people. For me in the end the frustration builds up and a lot of my energy is lost, until the thing that sucks has won from me.

From my experience if some things are outside of my power and I can’t accept it, also the best thing to give back towards the people responsible for the problem, is to leave. It’s probably a harsh message to leave their service, process or even company, but at least this is more transparant than ‘lying’ about it not being a thing that really sucks. Else they would be living in a false truth.

Conclusion

I applied these steps to small and bigger things that sucked for me and it worked pretty nicely for me. Each problem might end at a different step, but for me it always ends in a way that I can live with. I’m curious to whether you have applied this to problems and how that worked out for you. Please let me know! :)