It all comes down to liking what you do
While I basically agree with this - that's not enough. I've met great, willing and dedicated guys who did a fantastic development job for 99% of the project lines of code. The rest, 1% of the code, was typically what makes a difference when you hold a degree: algorithms. One guy had a hard time assessing the complexity of his own algorithms - even roughly - this is math. Another one had no clue about race conditions. The problem is the 1% may take 99% of the dev time to get identified / fixed / rewritten.
Please stop hiring unqualified people.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.