It's like saying a doctor isn't doing interesting things if they're just content to apply medical knowledge to improve community health. The doctor is just using tools developed by other people.

I'd feel better about this if it weren't for the growing evidence that an awful lot of what we actually get is cargo-cult medicine - procedures that have been supplanted or invalidated, but are still widely used by non-research doctors who don't know better.

Obviously doctors are still good, and don't need to be doing research to make the world a better place. I agree that dismissing 'plumbing' programmers or 'rote' doctors would be a serious mistake. But... well, I can't help drawing some connections between programmers implementing already-broken security, and doctors putting in heart stents that don't actually help patients.

I don't think we're just being metaphorical here, I think research vs practice doctors often show the same patterns as programmers, for the same reasons. Creating new knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for keeping up with other people's knowledge, but we seem to be worryingly bad at keeping people who implement that knowledge up to date.

(Context on the doctors: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evid...)