We can't be landing rovers on the surface of Mars every day. Every job is bound to have its share of drudgery or downright unpleasant tasks, but hopefully there's enough fun to make up for them.
For me, I'm happiest doing straight server-tier application programing. I've started to enjoy some of the front end web app work now too, thanks to JQuery. I never liked working with JavaScript before JQuery came around. Also, getting money. That's way up on the list.
On the other hand, I tend to work on smallish project teams, so I have to cover a lot of areas. I
hate writing PL/SQL. That language just makes no sense to me. For that matter, I'm not a huge fan of regular SQL, but still get stuck writing it way too often. Also, XML configuration tasks tend to take up way too much of my time, whether that's creating
Maven builds, getting
JBoss to deploy right, or writing a Jasper report. Debugging is a fun process. Scouring Google to see if anyone has had the same problem with configuration, and hope they figured out a workaround ... not so much.