How do you stay grounded when writing software no one wants?

Ooof. It can be a _real_ rough situation. Combined with a few other things, a year of it led me into a several-month stretch of suicidal ideation this past summer.

Things that helped me:

1. Books on stoicism and spirituality. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck was helpful to me in learning to be more "in the world but not of the world" -- maintaining a sense of my own values even if it was significantly harder to practice them in my current social context. Find a writer whose style resonates with you.

2. Find 1-3 other user-centered engineers and set up a regular Friday end-of-day chat over tea/beer/whatever so you do not feel so isolated and alienated and so you can support each other.

3. Build tooling to improve the developer experience of your fellow engineers.

4. Read about the legislative history for the laws. Write yourself some user stories for the underlying spirit of the laws.

If your company has a way you can do it without it being a betrayal of your PM, build relationships with people who work in Risk & Compliance and build trust with them so you can listen to their stressors.

The book "On Bullshit Jobs" covers your situation in some detail, including the phenomenon of working on open source for free just for something interesting.

You may enjoy reading it, just for a clear understanding of the situation.

I mean no offence by this, but nobody wants to be a janitor or a garbageman (woman?) when they grow up. I hate washing dishes. It's just something that needs to be done and you are adding value to the world by ensuring that faceless corporations adhere to the rules they are bound by.

Not every job is fulfilling but a lot of them have to be done.

Recognise that the only software people actually want to use is entertainment/creative software (games, social media etc.) All other software just solves problems and/or makes it cheaper to get work done.

When you’re really young and new the front of ‘not giving a shit’ is cool. As you get older, you have to turn that front to reality if you want to be resilient. You must take on the new front of ‘caring’, and deep down inside not give a shit.

Inverse yourself.

Find a new job that makes you satisfied and quit.

It's a rough feeling for sure, I feel for you. I went through a similar phase for a couple of years adding features that weren't really necessary to software that ran in the background at a handful of customers that already did more or less everything it needed to. How big is the engineering department at your company? Can you try to focus more of your efforts on tooling or building out useful libraries for the other devs? In some sense this is even less impactful than the actual software, because your actual customers will care even less about this than new features, but at least you'd have the other devs as your users who might actually appreciate your work. It could be things like improving the build/deploy pipeline, any monitoring systems, developer documentation, writing libraries/frameworks that simplify common internal patterns, etc.

If you want to keep this job, but looking for some motivation: Maybe try to focus on developing good (expert level) craftmanship?

If overall quality of project is poor, it maybe even be possible to find some narrow aspect which is possible to polish. Expertise gained that way may be used later, when you finally start working on something meaningful in the future.

Think of the paycheck

I would leave and work on things people want and that I'm personally interested in. It's the only thing that's help (as you've pointed out yourself)

I simply can not and would not put up with a situation like the one you describe.

Its not being able to see the wood for the trees issue with a lot of development. you are largely removed from the users of the software so its hard to see the benefits of the software you produce

More than 98% of code written at this hour will be retired or rewritten beyond recognition in five years. Don't sweat it.

Write software that you need yourself.

sounds like every enterprise company.