Imagine that, software development is actual work!

Having said that, yes, it's tiresome, but it doesn't have to be that way. People with influence at your workplace can change things to be different/better/more fun. You can change things for yourself. If the workplace is nothing but a grind, people at that workplace have made a choice, implicitly or explicitly, to make it so. It's not that way everywhere, in my experience not even at majority of software development jobs.