"The problem is that programmers perceive mindless work as painful and time-consuming, but the reality is never so bad." No, that is the actual problem. Your f

"The problem is that programmers perceive mindless work as painful and time-consuming, but the reality is never so bad." No, that is the actual problem. Your feelings don't care about the facts. You don't want to filter developers for their tolerance for mindless, time-consuming and painful work. If you do that, Parkinson's law will strike you so hard you'll turn out like IBM. Of course, you also don't want to end up at the other extreme, where all the parts of your stack are so exotic that only one person on the planet is qualified to deal with it - and they just left the company.