I can vouch for it being a lot more fun! Doing puzzles is a useless waste of time.

Not true! Doing puzzles can help mitigate risk for dementia. Probably not necessary for those of us who do puzzling work day to day, but there is a solid benefit to society if people are in the habit of doing puzzles.

Working in programming is often a puzzle, and something useful is accomplished beyond exercising your brain.

For an analogy, if you walk to work every day instead of driving, you are accomplishing something useful beyond just the exercising.

My dad always tried to get a residence that was about a 15 min walk to work.

> puzzling work

You don't say. Appalling, even!