The problem here is that 'hard' is dimensionless and relative. There are people in Australia right now storming the gates of hell with a shovel and a hose because that's the job they signed up for. If that type of work is on the spectrum, I can't really think of anything in software/systems engineering that's 'hard'.
That sounds more like courage to me. Many of those shovel and hose carrying people would not make very successful software developers from my experience.
It takes a certain kind of mindset; attention to detail and an ability to visualize and work at high levels of abstraction.
To do it well, that is. Copy-pasting framework cruft until it sort of works is simply boring and the world would be a better place if we stopped doing that.
