[BerislavLopac]

  > A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled
  > helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together.
  > If you don't have someone to run to the truck for nails, hold shit, move
  > ladders, etc. productivity suffers because your talent is wasting time on
  > menial tasks.

But you are mistaken -- each of us (the software engineers) already has numerous helpers who fit this description perfectly. The only difference is that we don't call them "apprentices" -- we call them compilers, interpreters, build tools and the like. Probably the only term that is commonly used on both types of helpers is "git".

Joking aside -- if you find yourself and your team spending too much time on menial tasks, you need to focus more on automating them. Of course, how much can be automated depends on how much hardware is involved in your work; as long as we're in software world, pretty much anything can be automated.

[moritzwarhier]

Maybe the "untalented" colleague is the solution to the marginal cost problem of automation in IT!

E.g. they won't do anything productive until CI and dev setup are "idiot-proof" - which is a feature! Noone wants to need arcane, private knowledge about how to fix that one problem with that one container in dev.

[TeMPOraL]

Alright, so how can I automate away daily standups, timecards, semi-regular random corporate/legal paperwork, and everything about dealing with devops team?

[BerislavLopac]

You can't -- but that's not menial work.

[TeMPOraL]

To me, it is, and/or it generates an infinite stream of one/off unique menial work.