It’s reasonable to have tickets that are “is this API interesting to us?” or “how do clients use this new system?” It’s not a “problem”, and there aren’t definite goals. The task is open-ended, and it’s ultimately up to the developer’s judgement to decide that they are done.
To define terms, “the problem” is the issue faced by the client or the customer. The task isn’t the problem. A team should tackle tens or hundreds of tasks while still learning to understand the full problem. This is the motivation behind iterative processes like Scrum.
The author’s message is that if you don’t fulfill all 50 requirements _at all times_, you don’t even deserve to be a software developer (not even a junior). I disagree. I think I get the message that these rules are trying to send, but I think they are, as a whole, unreasonable in a professional, business environment. Everyone should be a product engineer, but being product-focused necessitates speculative activities that exist for no other reason than figuring out the boundaries of the problem being solved. And those activities need to be repeated as the problem is being solved, to evaluate if the problem is correctly understood. Someone, whether that’s a junior or a senior, needs to be spending time doing things that aren’t articulateable so that everyone else can articulate exactly why they are working on their current tasks.
As I become more senior, I’m starting to appreciate all of the tasks that don’t go onto the sprint board and aren’t articulateable. They exist because I need to know enough about Product’s or Account Management’s job to communicate with them, and I won’t know what exactly “complete” is until I’ve reached completion on those tasks. That’s part of the job, and I reject any list of rules that leaves no space for those activities.