Neither developer is lazy. They both work hard and solve a hard problem. However, the naive developer is perceived as taking a long time on an easy problem fo

Neither developer is lazy. They both work hard and solve a hard problem. However, the naive developer is perceived as taking a long time on an easy problem for no good reason, and might not even be allowed to finish. The wise developer is perceived as taking a disappointing but reasonable amount of time on a surprisingly difficult problem. That the wise developer achieves this by acting disingenuously and wasting a lot of other people's time tells us something about a social phenomenon we see in the comments here, namely that programmers care quite a lot about how they label the difficulties they face, and they feel most comfortable with labels that classify the difficulty outside their area of professional competence. Obviously the absurdity bothers me. I didn't enjoy being the naive developer, and I don't think I would enjoy being the wise developer, either, if I were capable of it. That means I'm doomed never to work alone. Right now my team is eight months into a project that was supposed to produce a prototype in three months, and we are yet to produce anything beyond a handful of disconnected demos. If I was doing this project by myself, or if I was leading a team of people like me, we would have been relieved of responsibility a long time ago. But we're fine because we have a couple of wise developers who are capable of communicating the difficulties in the manner described above, by essentially teaching other parts of the company that they don't know how to do their jobs. I dislike the reality and am intentionally painting an unflattering picture of it, but I'm not trying to assign blame or disparage any party, because I don't have a solution. I just thought I'd present it as a way of seeing things.