Tell a fish success is measured by climbing a tree, and he will spend his whole life thinking he’s a failure.
What skills, attitudes, personality traits have you seen mismatched to a certain job that later made the individual an awesome worker in another job?
I maintain that lazy programmers are the best programmers because they put all their energy towards having to do as little work as possible. Everything goes to efficiency. Everything that can be automated will be. The code will be structured and documented to avoid future work.
YUP can I automate this? is the output as good as my manual work? did I just save my client 8 billable hours? can I go home now
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
~ Bill Gates
Absolutely. Let me spend five hours to automate this ten minute task.
I did that once and cost someone their job.
Back in the bad old days of 2009, the company I apprenticed at furloughed the secretary and made me enter in job tickets. We had a special relationship with one client and they used us like one would use a drop shipping company – they sent us their customer orders and we fulfilled them. It was low volume (per job), high frequency work. About 80% of our tickets originated from PDFs that always followed the same pattern. As my first serious foray into programming, I automated the ticket intake for just their tickets so I didn’t have to type them up manually. At the time, I did not realize reducing a 10 minute task to 10 seconds (repeated about 15 times a day) would mean they never brought her back to work full time.
I don’t feel that bad about it: In the 5 years there she’d never been given a raise, the healthcare plan was atrocious, and she found out she was pregnant during the furlough. However, she decided to look for another job, and found one as a secretary at a school just down the street from her house. It was a dramatic pay increase, much better benefits, and better job security.
I left a few months later, and a year or so after, the business folded.
You’re talking about a recurring task that takes ten minutes every time. I’m talking about a one-off that would take ten minutes to do and never come up again. We are not the same.
You never specified it was a one-off. And lazy workers won’t automate a one-off, because they are lazy.
Ha! I’ve definitely done that, too.
It’s just the above story makes for more interesting reading.
If you do that task 6 times a day after a week you’re in a net positive of time. And a lazy programmer would not automate something he will do just once, because of laziness it’s easier to just do the 10 min task once.
xkcd has the chart for this: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Did that over and over job before last.
CFO was complaining about how much time “her girls” spent daily on a task.
“You’re scanning CSVs with you eyeballs?! I can make that go away.”
She didn’t understand what I was saying, so I went behind her back to her second in command.
“Send me a couple of example files.”
Within 2-hours we were ready to test. Perfect. My god accounting loved me.
Yes! There are so many times where a focus on efficiency is mislabeled “laziness”. As long as the job gets done the same or faster, it’s just efficient to put less work into it.