At a personal level, if time permits, I probably would just work on the code continuously until it's done, once and for all--to me, one long torture is better than a poke in the arm repeatedly day after day.

At a managerial level, a project manager (or someone in that role) should recognize if a programmer is of "maintenance" type or not, and assign tasks accordingly.

A "maintenance" type is someone who has greater mental endurance and tolerate towards repetitive tasks and reading someone else's code. He might also be someone who works better on existing work than doing something from the scratch himself.

A flap side of the "maintenance" type is someone who prefers creating new things from the start.

A possible task assignment arrangement could therefore be, assigning "maintenance" work to new hires as they're probably not ready to do their own project from the scratch yet, and at the same time they could learn something from existing codes. Gradually, you could see who are better off staying at "maintenance," and who doing something else.

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