>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
That is the strange part. My boss who is head of product for my organization has given me good feedback so far. It's mainly just me who is beating myself up. But it's mainly because I have a strong feeling I know what is to come. If we can't even ship a few trivial GET endpoints in six months, how the hell are we going to implement more complex API endpoints in any meaningful amount of time? Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?
> While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it.
Definitely doing my best here. Long walks listening to some podcasts have helped a lot. Spending time with my family has helped a lot too. But above all I'm trying to stay positive, because I feel like being negative and constantly being in a bad mood is just going to make things worse.
>Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?
That sounds like Tuesday. If you communicate how slow it goes and why it's so and do reasonable things and your boss doesn't have a problem, maybe the company is fine with this either failing or taking forever and they will learn something from it, but it needs to fail first before the learning happens. Some projects are like that.
If the project is scrapped, do you see yourself blamed for it, fired or get another project to deal with?
Fully agree with the second point. For me, learning another language (and a hard one for English speakers) has given me a new outlet for my brain and something difficult and rewarding to do.
In the past I would've given the majority of my "brain power" to just work, and while I have enjoyed that at certain points when I've learnt a lot, I feel like it is not great for mental health and well-roundedness long term. Especially as you say caring about something you don't own where more work =/= more gain.
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.