Two blunt replies that hurt but help

I was at a one on one with a manager. After not having accomplished much over the last few weeks and feeling like a fool, I decided I would lay the blame on the type and vagueness of my assignment. I said "It's vague, I work hard but it's to challenging given the time line", all the while looking at an outlook calendar full of events and meetings on the managers monitor and wondering, hey this guy got it easy. I wish I had luxury to just attend meetings and nothing else.And then, to bring me back to reality and put me in my place, I got this response, out of the blue, "So, it's 2014, why do you think this job has not been automated yet? We hire human software engineers to deal with vagueness and complexity that humans can deal with, For everything else, there's machines."

The second one, this time with another manager, who had the privilege to watch me scribble on a white board to show my "solution to a problem". In reality, I didn't have no solution, only some knowledge of the system and I was showing off what I got. And again, I got this one "I know you know about the system. Unforunately, we are not here to know about each other, we are here to solve a problem".