Some months ago I got a new colleague. We are not on the same team, yet we really clicked. Looking back, and also now, what we actually bond over is ranting. We work for a small company, there are no real processes, it's really total freestyle (we officially still call it 'agile' though). This lack of organization causes, at least in my and my colleagues opinion, serious issues for the company and the workflow. The fix seems to be pretty straightforward. We both addressed topics to our superiors, but nothing changed. They don't really perceive our problems as actual problems, because they live in their own bubbles with totally different difficulties.
The general expectation is that at the end of each sprint (I work in IT), we ship the updates and everything just works out fine. And when it does not, our superiors get upset and go on a blame rampage. "How could this break, we never had such an issue before!" Well, every single change in code might have unexpected consequences. In modern software development there is so much bloat! It is very difficult to manage such complexity. Impossible even. Once things calm down after the fix of the problem, everyone goes on as if nothing happened. There is no real root cause analysis to prevent such a fail in the future. All is back to normal again, right? Oh well, I guess another part of the issue is that even if something goes wrong, it is just not bad enough to cause the higher-ups to finally accept we have a problem. I suppose this is a general rule of the world. In my country, everyone knows the trains and railroads are bad. There is a lot of rant. Still, nobody does anything about it. Not unless something really bad happens - and it finally came to that a couple of months ago, trains crashed, people died. Suddenly, the government came up with a plan to modernize. There are a lot of such examples.
Back to topic, the frustration of this entire situation resulted into me and my colleague to complain to each other. It is good ventilation, and to having another person who can understand one, triggers pleasant feelings of kinship. Unfortunately, by doing this, we inadvertently keep ourself in this negative feedback loop affecting our mindsets, which totally overwhelms the positive sides of the company (and there are quite a lot, actually). Recently I have even started to browse job ads as I felt really frustrated about work in the last couple of months.
I'm well aware of quotes of wisdom like:
"Whatever you will give your energy to will grow"
or
"Change what you can, leave what you can't"
yet I've utterly failed to put it into practice! I mean I haven't even realized for months I have been poisoning my own mind. I had to be reminded of this by a random Youtube video. Anyway, I'm grateful for that and I will stop this practice right away. I will monitor my feelings for the next weeks, curious about how it goes. If nothing changes, I guess it is really time for a new job.