Comment by deanCommie

I'm sure salt miners needed to make peace with their toil and also focused on tools and techniques to be more productive; how to remove the salt most elegantly in nice clean blocks, minimize waste, reduce burden on their physical bodies.

But to their bosses their output was salt.

I'm sorry but unless you're working in open source for the pure love of the tech/craft, the output of software engineering is PROBLEM SOLVING.

That's why "build vs. buy" exists - sometimes it's better to buy a solution than buy one. That's why a valid solution to a problem sometimes is to convince a customer that their ask is wrong or unreasonable, and something simpler or easier would get them 99% of what they need with 1% of the effort.

That's our job.