Comment by tikhonj

If you're doing something forgettable, what makes you think the workaday Java or Python programmer would find it innately motivating?

Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivation, why would that work worse with Haskell or Clojure programmers than anybody else?

People are interested in different things along different dimensions. The way somebody is motivated by what they're doing and the way somebody is motivated by how they're doing it really don't seem all that correlated to me.