[_rrnv]

They fired the only guy who automated all his tasks, and did it so well nobody noticed for 6 years. They are idiots. They should have assigned him to automate the hell out of everybody else's tasks and gain tons of additional work-hours for free. This reminds me of that guy several years back who outsourced all his tasks to China and was employee of the month again and again. They also found out via IT dept, checking his strange VPN traffic. And again, fired the one guy who would be a perfect Outsource Lead. Oh well, the bots are coming, automation will rule them all, and those companies who are devoted to lines of code and employee keystrokes... Well, they will become obsolete.

[Declanomous]

I've heard that factories will rotate lazy people around the factory floor because the method that requires the least amount of effort to achieve the needed result. Then the company can teach the lazy person's method to their less lazy/less creative employees.

Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but I think there is a grain of truth in the story. Managed properly, laziness can benefit the company. The problem you run in to is that lazy individuals are difficult to manage properly. A company isn't going to realize the benefits from a lazy individual if they aren't permitted to find their own solution to problems, and the shortcuts lazy individuals take can be dangerous depending on what shortcuts they are taking.

I wouldn't want to work for a company that is willing to fire someone for not doing anything for six years because you wrote a script that did basically everything. It implies they value the effort pertaining to my work rather than the actual output, which is insane. That just reeks of terrible management.

That being said, I don't want to imply that all lazy people make great employees. I've definitely worked with people who were just completely unwilling to do anything but the bare minimum, if they did any work at all. I don't think individuals who actively avoid all work without coming up with an alternative are of much use to any organization.

[spc476]

I heard there are four types of people who work for you. In order (from most preferred to least preferred) are:

1) The smart and lazy---they'll find the easiest way to do the job (or automate it).

2) The dumb and hardworking---you an tell them what to do and they'll do it exactly how you tell them to.

3) The dumb and lazy---they won't help, but they won't necessarily hurt either (just the bottom line).

4) The smart and the hardworking---terrible combination.

I actually have experience with the fourth type of person. Twenty years ago I was doing some consulting work for a bank and had to convert a printed training manual into HTML (mid 90s). The person helping me was very smart and hardworking. I'm smart, but a bit lazy. I had to argue with the person not to dive into one process (linking each word in the text to an entry on the glossary page) because it would take hours to do by hand (around 100 files, perhaps 100 vocabulary words). We actually argued longer than I took for me to code up the solution (using lex---we were working on a Unix system).

[LyndsySimon]

This is attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general in WW1 and WW2.

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

[spc476]

Heh. Funny that it's a different order, but the smart and lazy are still at the top.

[Declanomous]

I'm definitely smart and lazy. My previous manager was very smart and very hardworking. It was a hilarious nightmare. We both really liked each other as people, and respected each other's work, but our work styles were so completely at odds. Once she knew how to do something, she absolutely did not want to change how that process worked. On the other hand, I would change a process because I figured out a way to cut 15 minutes off a weeks worth of work.

There's a running joke at work that under no circumstances should someone complain to me about a problem, because I will drop everything to discover the cause of the problem, and then 2 days later the entire process will be rewritten. Everyone else thinks I'm working myself to the bone, but I'm rewriting processes that used to take several days to complete so they only take a couple of hours, and the computer does most of the work without input. In my mind its perfectly lazy, because it means I don't have to walk anyone through the procedure or fix any problems caused by humans gumming up the works.

Plus, it feels so good to say "What does the text next to the button say?" When someone calls to ask what they should do next.

I have a theory that most programmers are lazy, because a certain kind of lazy person goes "I'm sure there is a better way of doing this." and then that person goes on to figure out how. The only problem is that sometimes that type of person can get sucked into learning a new framework when they could have used the less efficient framework in the first place and already have been done.

[kenperkins]

I think this is on the management as much as the employee. I'd hope employees look for more work to do as opposed to just taking a paycheck.