There is no paradox as the article describes. Psychology already knows effort from initiative is the result of conscientiousness. They just don’t know how to measure it.

What they do know is that higher conscientiousness is inherently good up to a point. Extreme conscientiousness is associated OCD type anxiety disorders. Low conscientiousness is inherently bad, so much so that it’s the primary characteristic of any number of disorders such as ADHD and autism. Conscientiousness is also negatively correlated to intelligence at around -0.27.

That being said some people will always avoid effort no matter how immediately associated that effort connects to a goal while other people find joy in an effort merely for the sake of their own industriousness. Although psychology is greatly challenged to associate any form of metric to observable efforts necessary to measure it psychology can still readily identify it.

I can also prove and demonstrate how conscientiousness relates to programming. For example many JavaScript developers cannot write the instructions to navigate a tree model, such as file system or DOM. The effort is just too great and they cannot do it even with years of programming experience. I can take a much less intelligent military soldier with no prior programming experience and teach them to master this skill within four hours of education, and their corresponding output will be vastly superior to that of the experienced programmer who cannot perform that sort of navigational effort. There is no paradox to any of this.