Should you hire a lazy developer? | Hacker News Reader

Should you hire a lazy developer?

parkersoftware.com

Makes me think of this quote:

I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.

-- Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

That quote sounds much like the Gervais principle with the stupid and diligent being "clueless".

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” -Bill Gates

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-pers...

Laziness is the mother of innovation.

Hard working lazy people seek solutions to do the necessary work with smallest and most efficient way possible to achieve lowest level of effort possible.

I am that kind of lazy. It works fine for me, but I have doubts about how valuable it is to my employer. The first bad case is that other, non-lazy developers don't feel any resistance to the repetitive tasks in the first place. When I make a script to parse help desk tickets, it only helps me because they don't adopt. The second case is when they don't trust scripts, and prefer to work from their own understanding. The third case is when they have ways of doing things (mostly reading code directly) that I would approach with a tool to make finding the problem easy.

I suspect that if I spent my time 100% on things that go into the codebase, the end users would be forced to use them so my efforts would be more fruitful for the company. I'm not going to expect to be able to persuade people to try Cygwin in my next job. If there's not an institution supporting my scripts they're not going to scale. So I guess don't hire a lazy developer if everyone else is happy doing it the hard way.

Yes if they’re also curious enthusiastic, creative and committed.

This is the key.

Laziness without those counterbalancing traits is simply sloth.

With those traits, you're more likely to hire somebody who wants to work smarter, not harder.

Likewise, without laziness, curiosity and creativity you're more likely to hire somebody who is perfectly fine with simply working harder, rather than trying to do things smarter.

Lazy person with a proven work ethic. Sounds paradoxical but you don't want a lazy bum who won't get moving when things really count.

The ideal person is one who is capable and hard working when it counts but chooses not to be that way when it's unnecessary.

How about this - a lazy person with empathy, who is viscerally aware that everybody else is lazy too, and enjoys eliminating work for any and everybody.

The Three Virtues of a software developer.

1. Lazyness. The first step towards efficiency. Why do you think automatic dishwashers exist?

2. Impatience. The first step towards performance optimization.

3. Antisocial. Ability to hyper-focus.

Counterpoint:

The three deadly sins of a software developer.

1. Lazyness. The first step toward never refactoring your code, or tackling tech debt. "We can live in the cruft, we've been doing it for years."

2. Impatience. The first step toward premature performance optimization of what the developer does, not what the user does. "I need my unit tests to run in under 5 seconds, otherwise I'm quitting."

3. Antisocial. Inability to work with other people on the project to produce a coherent solution.

I may be being a little hard on this, but in reality, all of these mindsets taken to extremes is generally not healthy. To get meta for a moment, what's important is to realize what's important, and what's not important, and then focus on what is important.

In reality, those deadly sins do exist, just as the virtues do. It depends on the person.

How about looking for a mix of types and talents. It seems to me companies are hiring lazy recruiters and hiring managers. "We hire X because it's the best."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com