You’re failing to understand the complaint is about the hollow term being used to sound grandiose.

A street sweeper “delivers value” in the form of a clean street. A lunch lady at a school “delivers solutions” in the form of reducing hunger in children.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do something for others, the criticism is of the vague terminology. The marketing speak. I’ve said that so many times, I’d hope that’d been clear.

> While you are clearly in the former camp

You’re starting from wrong assumptions. No, I’m not “in the former camp”, I find the whole premise to be a false dichotomy to begin with. Reality is a spectrum, not a binary choice. It’s perfectly congruent to believe a great product for customers is the goal, and that the way to achieve it is through care and deliberate attention to the things you do.

> You’re failing to understand the complaint is about the hollow term being used to sound grandiose.

This isn’t a critique of language - it’s a category error. You’re confusing the mechanism with the purpose.

In your examples, a street sweeper or lunch lady (Google says this is an antiquated US term for canteen worker?) do indeed deliver value, clean streets and nourished students. That's the value they're paid to provide. Those are the outcomes we care about, and whether the sweeper uses a broom or Bucher Citycat is only of interest in that one allows the sweeper to provide more value at lower cost, eg more metres of clean road per dollar.

The same is true of the canteen worker, who may use Rationales and bains marie to serve more hot meals at lower cost than cooking each meal individually.

> You don’t “deliver solutions”, you write software (or have it written for you).

Saying you "write software", not deliver solutions actually indicates that you don't understand the profession you're in. It mistakes the process for the outcome. Writing code is one means among many for achieving an outcome, and if the same outcome could be achieved by the business without software, the software would be dropped instantly. Not because care doesn’t matter, but because the purpose was never the code itself.

> It’s perfectly congruent to believe a great product for customers is the goal, and that the way to achieve it is through care and deliberate attention to the things you do.

But according to you, care and deliberate attention (software as craft) are the only way. An absolutist position. But most software that matters is imperfect, build over time, touched by many hands, and full of compromises. Yet it still delivers enormous value. That’s evidence that outcomes, not purity of process, is what delivers value and defines success in the real world.