When monotony kills you professionally

A lot of the time you'll find that your project manager (product owner, CTO, whatever you want to call them) can be a pain. But trust me: it's far better to have one, because dealing with the client directly as a developer is... exhausting.

Let me explain.

Picture this. It's Monday, eight in the morning. You sit down at your desk and boot up the computer. You take a sip of that heavenly brew you just made. You open your inbox and the company chat to see what's brewing before diving into your new task, and then you spot it: the notification that ruins your whole morning. The client wants you to change, again, the thing you've already redone at least thirteen times.

And you know it won't be the last time.

You take another sip of coffee as you read the email, where the client says everything is "perfect, but...". Right below it, you see your boss has already replied on your behalf: "no problem, we'll have it ready shortly." We'll? What do you mean, we'll?

"You've got to be kidding me," you think.

So you message your boss to ask what's going on, and for the millionth time he tells you it's "the last push before we ship this and move on to something new." Even though you both know that's not how it's going to go.

And so the weeks go by. Then the months. Monotony creeps into your working life: the same code, over and over, tweaking one tiny detail at a time. Each round with a little less motivation, a little less care, a little less quality. You vent to your colleagues in the work chat, and they tell you they're stuck in the exact same rut. No progress. No movement. And somehow, at the end of every month, the company still manages to pay you, as if it were shelling out money for the sole pleasure of watching someone waste their time.

Until one day a colleague mentions they've started job-hunting on LinkedIn. And your eyes light up. A new challenge?

So you dig out your CV, blow off the dust, and update it. You fire it off to dozens of companies, applying to anything that looks even remotely interesting.

Next thing you know, you're on a video call with a Turkish woman living in the Netherlands, talking to you in English about building a food-delivery app for Barcelona. And it happens more than once, because you don't clear every interview on the first try.

Eventually, a company decides you're the person they've been looking for and makes you an offer. Do you take it?

Well, that's more or less what happened to me. All I wanted was a new job where my brain would actually be challenged, with something resembling a product manager to shield me from clients who did nothing but ask for the same damn change on repeat. That very afternoon I accepted the offer and handed in my notice.

Sometimes you get lucky and land a job with a bright, interesting future ahead of you. But the opposite can happen just as easily: you stagnate and start craving something else. Something, anything, different, because you're burned out doing the same thing on a loop with nothing new on the horizon.

Cheers, and may life throw plenty of challenges your way!