>I always tell my Jr. Engineers that if you have to work THAT HARD to accomplish your daily tasks then you need to go back to school or go for a more newbie-friendly position.

I don't think that this is very productive thing to say to someone. If the Junior Engineer is still able to produce, why do you care how much they struggled with it? If a person truly wants to grow and then struggling on problems that are on the edge of their comfort zone sounds like the perfect way to do it.

If their abilities are effecting project timelines, quality, profitability, etc then I can understand having that conversation with them but I really don't see the harm in someone challenging themselves professionally.

I mean, yes there's nothing wrong with engineers struggling and pushing their skills and boundaries, it's how we grow and improve. But persistent struggling with daily tasks is indicative of a deeper problem. There might be missing knowledge, or the mistaken idea that programmers should be hard workers to be productive.

Using our tools of simplification, abstraction, automation and domain knowledge, it's critical to teach your juniors how to be optimistically lazy and do less. That's how we raise great engineers. Otherwise, we're just raising mid-level programmers who only know how to throw lots more code at their problem, and as I hope we all know by now, more code never results in fewer problems.

>Or discipline. None of which you can manifest by sheer force of will.

Having discipline is the same thing as having force of will.

Its interesting that you've been down voted. I'm not suggesting that you are correct or wrong, but I'd geniunely like to hear a philosopher or somesuch clever thinker talk at length on this topic - are they the same? are they different? is the ability to get through a difficult physical experience such as pain related to being able to work at a task you show no interest in for hours? Is it a single trait that you either have or don't, or do some people have remarkable discipline when it comes to office work and others are disciplined when it comes to gardening or cooking for hours with passion all day every day? Is it something that is geniunely in a person's character, or is it to do with other things (do people with discpline just get more sleep/have a better upbringing/have interesting work to do etc?)

I don't want to pass any judgement nor assume the answers to any of these questions - I'd like to see/hear/read discussion on it.