Dumb and gets things done | Hacker News Reader

Dumb and gets things done

johndcook.com

103 pointsfogus24 comments

This is off topic, but I've read that Napoleon actually did value his stupid but energetic officers. They could be counted on to charge whenever ordered, even against impossible odds. (That particular officer would likely die, but that was acceptable part of the overall plan.) Baron Marbot was wounded a dozen or so times this way.

Reminds me of a Critical Thinking course my company held; the instructor asked everyone how many lazy people they'd want working for them. Everyone who answered said "none", but the instructor countered that they would want at least a few lazy people, so that those people could find the shortcuts and work-saving techniques that could save the whole group time, instead of going full out on a bunch of stuff that's unnecessary or needlessly tedious. I assume the assumption was that these lazy people were also competent, ie. "smart", or they wouldn't necessarily find/make the short-cuts...

Or worse, the shortcuts they took ended up hurting in the long-run.

Making room for the new interns' desks by putting them in the unused corner, instead of renting more office space, is a great shortcut, unless it blocks the fire escape and your building catches fire.

Wouldn't you trust the rest of the team to cross-check that? I mean, if no ones sees that the fire escape is blocked, not only the lazy folks are your problem...

That would not be very smart, in the first place.

That is where this famous quote was cribbed from?

" I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often two of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

Personally, I try to follow the Perl virtues -- laziness, hubris and impatience.

http://wiki.preshweb.co.uk/doku.php?id=perl:virtues

Edit: Can anyone give a reference to the Napoleon quote? Was that the German general playing off Napoleon? (Or was TFA written by someone too dumb to Google and energetic enough to write from memory?)

What's going on is the usual process by which good quotes get detached from their original authors and grafted onto celebrities (Napoleon in this case). It helps the quote propagate faster. The internet seems to accelerate this process - or maybe it's that it makes it visible because original sources are easier to track down than they used to be. In any case, it's a fun little mini-hobby to follow these things. For example, Gandhi never said the one about "first they laugh at you", Einstein never said the one about insanity being doing the same thing over and over, etc.

I've never seen the insanity one attributed to Einstein; usually people say it comes from AA. Personally, that one always drove me nuts because, while I appreciate the sentiment, the way it is phrased is blatantly wrong. I eventually came up with a suitable response: whenever someone quotes that one to me, I pull out a coin and start flipping it repeatedly, calling out "heads" or "tails" each time.

Amusing, many people get it "wrong" and I don't even know which is the original between the two of "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a (different/same) result."; to me both are equally wrong and useless. In a world that is always adapting, doing the same thing over and over again will often locally have the same effect but globally it won't as conditions change, and the aphorism is basically never actually useful or as wise as it sounds.

My experience is that "dumb and gets things done" is almost always the most heavily rewarded. Mostly because they are always busy. Most managers tend to stop once they determine if someone gets things done. And the dumb ones certainly get more done than anyone else.

Reminds me of the note at the end of the perl man page:

"The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris."

I'm not a Perl guy, but I love that quote.

I'm usually dumb until I've gotten something done. Then I realize I could have done it much smarter.

Refactoring is not just for code. :)

"Joel Spolsky says that the ideal programmer is someone who is smart and gets things done. But what about people who are dumb and get things done?"

They are not ideal.

According to this article they should be shot.

There is no end to what they can do:

http://www.dante.com/bigsquiff/albums/jasonb/demotivational/...

Deep to this is the ability to measure. We like to measure things, and we like to reward proportionate to what we measure.

It doesn't work for creativity based fields, but it works great for non-creative tasks. I would look up Dan Pink's book called Drive.

You can factor the work equation and combine both methodologies to enable smart programmers to work with dumb programmers. The key is to understand where the line between smart and tedious is.

There's a similarity with politics. Ideally you want to vote for someone ethical and effective. But the worst candidate is someone who is unethical and effective.

Computer programs consists of lines of code, and lines of code consist of characters. So it’s good for a programmer to be proficient in producing lines of code and characters.

The more proficient I get the more I think that there's an inverse relationship between proficiency and lines of code needed to produce a result.

IMHO the writer is setting up simplistic strawmen to knock down, without going into nuances. For e.g., why conflate 'getting things done' with 'producing bad code'?

Also, in the paragraph about a 'good teacher', he protests that that this wouldn't matter if they were ignorant. Maybe he could do a better job of conveying the exact context, but I would contend that 'good' implies 'knowledgeable' for a teacher. I've had plenty of teachers who were knowledgeable, but couldn't teach/communicate for nuts.

p.s: I might be a bit defensive here, as I honestly consider myself of the 'dumb but gets things done' ilk.

A teacher who instills enthusiasm in a subject area is more valuable than a teacher with no knowledge gaps in said subject area, all other things being equal.

I'd first get rid of "smart and doesn't get things done"

As a high schooler, I'm fascinated with a similar paradox that I've observed. In my opinion there are four defining types of students, smart with a strong work ethic, average intelligence with a strong work ethic, smart but prone to procrastination, and average and prone to procrastination. In the schooling system, the order I listed is also the order of highest grades to lowest grades, meaning that these groups are ordered in highest to lowest scholastic value. I don't think this order is relevant outside of school though as people take more targeted jobs that appeal to their interests. This presents a problem as college admittance is based on the hierarchy I listed, meaning that some of the smarter kids will be put on a path that doesn't set them up for an optimal career.

Many times "dumb and energetic" succeed because they don't overthink what can't be done and somehow make their problem everyone else's.

This is like the person that keeps calling you to fix their computer (and then you keep doing it).

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