There are a ton of jobs that are tool-heavy, and the "solving problems" only applies to a small percentage of the team.
Some problems should not exist at all and only exists because of the tooling chosen.
Example: A friend of mine works at a company that is running their business on some clown-ish cloud infrastructure, and their SREs have to basically re-invent the wheel to work around the limitations of the cloud vendor the management has chosen (for example: no virtual machine autoscaling, in a cloud environment). Somebody at that company is certainly doing "creative work" and "solving problems" with code, but not those SREs.
Comments
It's not cynicism, sadly.
There are a ton of jobs that are tool-heavy, and the "solving problems" only applies to a small percentage of the team.
Some problems should not exist at all and only exists because of the tooling chosen.
Example: A friend of mine works at a company that is running their business on some clown-ish cloud infrastructure, and their SREs have to basically re-invent the wheel to work around the limitations of the cloud vendor the management has chosen (for example: no virtual machine autoscaling, in a cloud environment). Somebody at that company is certainly doing "creative work" and "solving problems" with code, but not those SREs.