I have a deeper problem. When I'm calling sort() it is useful that it returns a sorted list. However my program rarely has sorted lists of any sort in any requirement. My requirements are around the features my users care about. Sure the list of employees that I need to display needs to be sorted (sometimes by hire date, sometimes by title, sometimes by name - and often combinations of the above), but there are a lot of things I'm doing with that list that are not sorting.

In which way is that a "deeper" problem? What you are doing with that data can also be expressed as a formal spec.

Sorting is just used as an example everywhere because everybody knows exactly what we are talking about without having to explain a lot, it has a somewhat easy solution space and everybody has implemented some form at some point, likely in school, for the same reasons . Of course real world software is more complex that that but that's not the point.