I'm not sure the comparison works though. He doesn't object to the act of writing a book, I suspect he didn't even really have too big an issue with writing a detective novel. He objected to being asked to do those things badly when he knew he could do better.

We're talking plots he felt made no sense, poor characters, clunky dialogue, and when he tried to improve these things he was told in no uncertain terms to stop messing about and go back to what the publisher was paying him for.

The equivalent for a programmer would be to be told to code a website with actively bad coding standards, no use of style sheets or code reuse, no normalisation or referential integrity in the database and no error handling. And every time you try to make something better, you get told to shut up and do it the way you've been asked.

I don't know about you but that would make me hate the project.