Everyone is tainted by their own experience, I suppose, but I feel like I get to work on plenty of interesting problems. What bothers me (and this author it seems) is having to spend your time learning arbitrary things, such as an XML format for a configuration file, or nuances of how different browsers handle different conditions.

However, we (web developers at least) are writing software that is supposed to run on just about any hardware / OS / browser combination, and making that happen and doing complex and interesting things in that context is going to involve lots of arbitrary details.

That being said, if I think back 10 years, this type of work has become dramatically more pleasant thanks to a lot of open source software that has matured in that time.

If the complaint is that we can't all write our own virtual memory system or our own b-tree, I suppose I can't disagree that that is becoming less of a reality. However, solving interesting problems still requires an understanding of these things, and using existing libraries in my experience saves me time and allows me to have a bigger-picture view and solve larger problems. It is still very satisfying. If this article is written from the perspective of someone automating simple and mundane business processes, putting together forms, etc, then I believe the complaints are misdirected.