Fantastic little parable. Saw a part of myself in quite a few of those.
One I'd like to add is the developer who's so enmeshed in maintaining FOSS software that all they can do is label & triage tickets but never quite find time to start fixing them. I've found myself caught in that lately and am trying to figure out how to chip away at the ever-growing Issue Monster I've let form.
This is where a junior developer can really help, even if it's junior in the sense that they are not as familiar with the project as you are. There is no better way to become familiar with the true problems and priorities of a project than to triage bug reports from the people actually using the software. You may be too deep into it to see that.
Don't prioritize based on what is the "fun technical challenge" but instead figure out how you can get users to be happier with what you are building. Also remember that sometimes the answer is code, and quite often it is documentation or a code sample showing the "right" way to do it.
Strangely, what you are doing may be closer to helping humans than the caricatures from the story. The tickets presumably represent real problems experienced by real humans, and maybe the labeling and triaging brings them closer to actually being addressed.
One I'd like to add is the developer who's so enmeshed in maintaining FOSS software that all they can do is label & triage tickets but never quite find time to start fixing them. I've found myself caught in that lately and am trying to figure out how to chip away at the ever-growing Issue Monster I've let form.