I'm ambivalent about this concept. I agree that everywhere I've worked, there's been a residue of boring yet necessary stuff like your describing. Sometimes t

I'm ambivalent about this concept. I agree that everywhere I've worked, there's been a residue of boring yet necessary stuff like your describing. Sometimes the residue could be reduced by automation; not always. However I'm very concerned about the potential of these 'slow' developers injecting bad code into the codebase. By bad, I mean redundant. The 'slow' developer will create code that later gets maintained by the 'quick' developer - who is soon disgrunted and slow. Unless he just rewrites it from scratch. If you really have a steady stream of 'stuff' to feed the 'slow' developer, great. Otherwise he will work through his queue and end up smearing cruft around. I don't know the answer, but I'd rather have a very bright, very inexperienced developer for that role than a 'slow' one.