That sounds like the definition of any job.

As a janitor, your job is not to mop floors. Your job is to clean messy problems.

True. And, yet, if the floors are spotless, but the janitor seems to spend 90% of his day on the iPhone... How many managers are clueful enough to figure out that the janitor is accomplishing the task and leave him to do so in his own way?

All kinds of people mistake work for a form of punishment: if you don't look like you're toiling you must be doing something wrong. This is especially true when evaluating someone else's work.

trivia: the portuguese form of work (trabalho) is a derivative of tripalium - an ancient roman torturing tool.

So yeah, it kinda makes sense that some people take work as punishment... :-)

I think Cook is a better analogy

Anyone who hasn't realised that shouldn't be allowed near a compiler.

That's a bit harsh. When I was 15 and learning how to program, I didn't actually have any problems to solve; I just programmed because programming was fun. If I hadn't gone through that phase, though, I would never have learned how to program well enough to consider using code to solve problems.

I really meant that comment to be restricted to a commercial context - in someone is paying you to code, they are usually asking for problems to be solved and sometimes those problems don't require much (or any) code to be written.