6 ms·

Lazy people innovate

105 points by aggarwalachal 14y ago

AsylumWarden 14y ago
If lazy people really do innovate then I am surely the god of innovation. One day I will actually make the effort to lift my hands and do something besides flip the channel with my TV remote. Seriously though, I get what the writer is talking about though I would think it is more of a desire for efficiency. I don't want to keep writing the same code repeatedly but that isn't really laziness.
bestest 14y ago
I would read the post, but it's quite unreadable on my Chrome run on Windows. Understandably, I would most definitely find numerous ways of making the text readable for myself (copy paste to notepad, or disable CSS etc), but it's not the point. That serif font is simply terrible.
eslachance 14y ago
Misattributed to Bill Gates: "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because he will find an easy way to do it". I'm not sure who that's actually from, but the idea behind it is the same. However, one has to remember that to innovate while being lazy isn't actually simple. I won't go out of my way to make something cool and innovative because, well, I'm lazy. It's only when it saves me time and I absolutely have to do it, that I'll come up with great ideas (as "S" did when faced with her favorite toy).
- aggarwalachal 14y ago
  Exactly. :)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Reminds me that crawling isn't a recognized developmental step, but directed movement is. Seemed little "S" has pretty good command of directed movement, by moving her target to herself.
- politician 14y ago
  It's called Hlade's Law (and was recently featured on reddit).
tiatia 14y ago
"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-Equordn (German General)
- rhizome 14y ago
  Related: The Gervais Principle http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
- kator 14y ago
  That's an awesome quote. I couldn't agree more. lazy and clever people find ways to solve problems that most people never try because they are too clever. But at the same time these clever/lazies will spend 100's of hours trying to solve a problem that can be done 10 times in 10 hours. But once they break through they can do it in 10 seconds and laugh as they click in joy and laugh at the fool who is still doing it in 10 hours... :)
grassclip 14y ago
Laziness definitely drives people to innovation, but being bored with what's currently being done is another indicator of an innovator. I would almost say even more so because laziness implies no wanting to do something.
- j_baker 14y ago
  ...and it makes you wonder what they will do to not do something.
superasn 14y ago
Larry Wall once reputedly said: "The three attributes of a programmer are; impatience, laziness and hubris". He didn't mean that hackers sit around in front of the TV or wasting their time, that they're too impatient to sit down and take some time to do anything, or so hubristic that they can't listen to other ideas. All three of these attributes have negative connotations, but all are meant in a positive way. Hackers are impatient as they don't want to hang around wasting time when they could be solving the "real" problem. They don't want to be jumping through pointless political hoops before they can get to real work. They are lazy because they don't want to have to type in the same command 50 times with small variance in the command - they write a script to do it for them. This script is by far the better solution, not only saving time now, but saving time in the future and expanding the hackers experience and knowledge. Hackers are hubristic not because they think their ideas are the best, or they can do anything. Far from it, hackers are very often very deferential to other, more senior hackers, and very often use other "good" solutions as part of their own. You need to have some sort of hubris to actually start a bit of work in the first place. Without hubris, the Linux kernel probably would never have been started. [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers
- kenmazy 14y ago
  That's funny, I interpreted what he said a bit differently for "impatience" and "hubris". To me, impatience and hubris go hand in hand for a good hacker. Impatience: Why is this code taking so long? Hubris: I could write code that is way faster/better than this!
- saraid216 14y ago
  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
jiggy2011 14y ago
This isn't lazy so much as efficient, you are swapping manual effort for mental effort. For example. Go to a lazy person's house and the whole place is a mess; Go to a diligent persons house and it is very tidy, because they clean everything top to bottom. Go to an engineer's house and they have arranged everything so that it can be made reasonably clean in under 30 mins.
- j_baker 14y ago
  This isn't lazy so much as efficient, you are swapping manual effort for mental effort. Unfortunately, not everyone sees that distinction.
- saraid216 14y ago
  Oh, that's because building a robot to automate house-cleaning is still kinda hard.
- harigov 14y ago
  I agree. The problem is most people see unwillingness to putting physical effort as laziness, while it can as well be applied to mental effort and still be valid.
mnicole 14y ago
In a similar vein, I attribute my passion for UX and design to my stupidity; I need things to be as straight-forward/easy/friendly as possible. I can be pretty annoying to be around when a process (airports, business protocols, etc.) don't make sense or are much more difficult than they need to be, but sometimes things are so backwards you wonder how anything gets done at all.
h3rmitcrab 14y ago
Lazy people sit on their asses and do nothing. It is the smart people who innovate. Please do not promote the culture of laziness.
- pilgrim689 14y ago
  I'm totally with you on this. People are confusing laziness with efficiency and smarts. When someone works to make work more efficient, he is still working! By definition, a lazy person is unwilling to work (and that includes work that optimizes work). I'd hire a smart hard-working developer over a smart lazy one any day.
  - aggarwalachal 14y ago
    I would definitely hire a smart hard-working developer. But, aren't they little hard to come by? People are lazy because they are not challenged by the things around them.
    - frugalfirbolg 14y ago
      The terms lazy and hard-working are used loosely here. I definitely would hire a smart programmer that's not afraid of doing things the 'hard' way when the constraints of the project demand it, but a programmer that too easily falls into doing it the hard-way may not be considering alternatives that are more maintainable long-term, and I've seen enough people get burned out by marathons of working the hard way that some surveys of the technology and pilot projects before jumping in (or just having an experienced specialist on-board) would have saved lives and careers. The point of this article is that some people are lazy in a different way. They aren't lazy because they aren't challenged. They just appear to be lazy because their hands aren't at the keyboard. They're actually the opposite of lazy because they are tackling the additional challenges of evaluating all of the possibilities and trying to find the most expressive and easiest maintained implementation. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for a quick and dirty hack session, and sometimes you just need to hard-code the stuff to get the first version out the door, but if you have the luxury of making it right the first time, go for it. Just don't forget to counter-point, "Perfect is the enemy of good".
danso 14y ago
I'd rather spend 29 minutes coding a solution to a repetitive 30-minute task, even if it required more brainwork than just going through the motions. At least I'm getting some experience out of the grunt work.
- adamio 14y ago
  I've found these 29 minute solutions can often be re-purposed and reused beyond the original intent, in even more innovative ways.
  - danso 14y ago
    Yep, that goes without saying :). But even if the actual code/module never gets reused, writing something similar will take much less time in the future, even from scratch...which is good because I'm not quite yet lazy enough to abstract code as I write it...
- hobin 14y ago
  For many tasks, I would even prefer working on a solution for an hour instead of doing grunt work for half that time. Most often, I simply can't stand that kind of work, so I have no problem at all with taking some extra time to do things my way(TM).
jstalin 14y ago
Read the book "Thinking, fast and slow." We are genetically programmed (as are all living things) to conserve energy and make things easier for ourselves. I guess the author could more accurately replace "lazy" with "make things easier" and be more accurate. It drives everything we do as human beings, from politics (read Frederic Bastiat's works) to everyday lives (driving instead of walking to work, choosing to type rather than write a note). It's the people who realize "this could be done more easily" that innovate. I guess lazy is just a simpler way of saying it.
Zenst 14y ago
Lazy people plan more and in that are more likely to find the optimal solution. They also put of things and alot of tasks negate themselfs or were redundant to start with. Manager asking for a report say. You could do it then and drop other things or you could leave it and if it is important you will get chassed up for it. If this happens alot a lazy person will write a script to do it, not tell said manager and gain from it. Others do the script, tell the manager and then get workbombed for no extra return. Lazy is in many ways another word for smart. Thing is though when you say lazy, most people think of poor hygiene, says alot about them mostly.
amix 14y ago
One of my computer scientist professors once said: "A good computer scientist solves problems. A great computer scientist creates tools that solve problems."
kator 14y ago
My physics teacher in high school used to say inventors are insane. They invest 100x the time to solve a problem then it would take to just do the work. But they are so happy when they can do it in 1/10th the time when they have their new invention. Meanwhile everyone watches in horror as the inventor spends all that time looking for the solution thinking how insane the inventor is because they could just "do the work already".
- frugalfirbolg 14y ago
  “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw Hopefully your physics teacher also made a point similar to this: Even if it takes the inventor 10 years to automate something that takes a worker one day to do, it can benefit everyone in the long run if that task is done often and on a large scale.
b_emery 14y ago
> The one who invented multiplication did not want to add numbers all life Reminds me of favorite fact from 'The Information'. The original use of logarithms was by human 'computers', literally, people paid to run the calculations to fill tables, which were then printed and sold in books. They used them to turn difficult multiplication and division problems into simpler addition and subtraction (reducing error and effort apparently). Sometimes I think math should be taught with much more historical context!
- zerohp 14y ago
  My college professors did a pretty good job of giving some historical context to new ideas when they are presented, but I really wish there was a review class that gave historical context to all of the ideas from arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  It's funny because I recently used logarithms for exactly that, just on a computer. Basically, if you're using a naive Bayes classifier, you may have to multiply really small probabilities. Floating point numbers are not great at multiplying really small numbers. So the trick is to take the logarithm of the probabilities and add them together.
  - b_emery 14y ago
    Very cool! Would not have thought of that.
arihant 14y ago
Innovation comes more from impatient people, not lazy people. There is very wide gap between impatient and the lazy. The guy who invented multiplication wasn't lazy (as mentioned in the article, or else he won't do work for invention, which is always harder than adding numbers), but he probably did it because he couldn't wait long enough for all the answers he wanted.
mitchi 14y ago
<< Used Autohotkey to automate saving porn images to disk with Google Chrome. Programmer laziness = You are doing something that annoys you because it's slow so you take a whole day scripting and automating something that accelerates it. Ofc, didn't take me a day to do that.
- frugalfirbolg 14y ago
  lol I have to ask, were you just using mouse-clicks, or did you have it pop open the inspector and pull the images from there? Since you're on Windows, you might want to check out the System.Net.WebClient object in Powershell.
satori99 14y ago
Heinlen did it already... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_o...
soyabean 14y ago
I'm reminded of the quote: "If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness must be the father"
supergrowth 14y ago
We at www.RealEstateDealStreet.com think that it is not laziness make them innovative but time they spent on thinking make them innovative and lay man thinks that thinking as laziness.

105 points by aggarwalachal 14y ago

If lazy people really do innovate then I am surely the god of innovation. One day I will actually make the effort to lift my hands and do something besides flip the channel with my TV remote. Seriously though, I get what the writer is talking about though I would think it is more of a desire for efficiency. I don't want to keep writing the same code repeatedly but that isn't really laziness.

bestest 14y ago

I would read the post, but it's quite unreadable on my Chrome run on Windows. Understandably, I would most definitely find numerous ways of making the text readable for myself (copy paste to notepad, or disable CSS etc), but it's not the point. That serif font is simply terrible.

eslachance 14y ago

Misattributed to Bill Gates: "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because he will find an easy way to do it". I'm not sure who that's actually from, but the idea behind it is the same. However, one has to remember that to innovate while being lazy isn't actually simple. I won't go out of my way to make something cool and innovative because, well, I'm lazy. It's only when it saves me time and I absolutely have to do it, that I'll come up with great ideas (as "S" did when faced with her favorite toy).

aggarwalachal 14y ago
Exactly. :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sageikosa 14y ago
Reminds me that crawling isn't a recognized developmental step, but directed movement is. Seemed little "S" has pretty good command of directed movement, by moving her target to herself.
politician 14y ago
It's called Hlade's Law (and was recently featured on reddit).

tiatia 14y ago

"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-Equordn (German General)

rhizome 14y ago
Related: The Gervais Principle http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
kator 14y ago
That's an awesome quote. I couldn't agree more. lazy and clever people find ways to solve problems that most people never try because they are too clever. But at the same time these clever/lazies will spend 100's of hours trying to solve a problem that can be done 10 times in 10 hours. But once they break through they can do it in 10 seconds and laugh as they click in joy and laugh at the fool who is still doing it in 10 hours... :)

grassclip 14y ago

Laziness definitely drives people to innovation, but being bored with what's currently being done is another indicator of an innovator. I would almost say even more so because laziness implies no wanting to do something.

j_baker 14y ago
...and it makes you wonder what they will do to not do something.

superasn 14y ago

Larry Wall once reputedly said: "The three attributes of a programmer are; impatience, laziness and hubris". He didn't mean that hackers sit around in front of the TV or wasting their time, that they're too impatient to sit down and take some time to do anything, or so hubristic that they can't listen to other ideas. All three of these attributes have negative connotations, but all are meant in a positive way. Hackers are impatient as they don't want to hang around wasting time when they could be solving the "real" problem. They don't want to be jumping through pointless political hoops before they can get to real work. They are lazy because they don't want to have to type in the same command 50 times with small variance in the command - they write a script to do it for them. This script is by far the better solution, not only saving time now, but saving time in the future and expanding the hackers experience and knowledge. Hackers are hubristic not because they think their ideas are the best, or they can do anything. Far from it, hackers are very often very deferential to other, more senior hackers, and very often use other "good" solutions as part of their own. You need to have some sort of hubris to actually start a bit of work in the first place. Without hubris, the Linux kernel probably would never have been started. [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers

kenmazy 14y ago
That's funny, I interpreted what he said a bit differently for "impatience" and "hubris". To me, impatience and hubris go hand in hand for a good hacker. Impatience: Why is this code taking so long? Hubris: I could write code that is way faster/better than this!
saraid216 14y ago
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris

jiggy2011 14y ago

This isn't lazy so much as efficient, you are swapping manual effort for mental effort. For example. Go to a lazy person's house and the whole place is a mess; Go to a diligent persons house and it is very tidy, because they clean everything top to bottom. Go to an engineer's house and they have arranged everything so that it can be made reasonably clean in under 30 mins.

j_baker 14y ago
This isn't lazy so much as efficient, you are swapping manual effort for mental effort. Unfortunately, not everyone sees that distinction.
saraid216 14y ago
Oh, that's because building a robot to automate house-cleaning is still kinda hard.
harigov 14y ago
I agree. The problem is most people see unwillingness to putting physical effort as laziness, while it can as well be applied to mental effort and still be valid.

mnicole 14y ago

In a similar vein, I attribute my passion for UX and design to my stupidity; I need things to be as straight-forward/easy/friendly as possible. I can be pretty annoying to be around when a process (airports, business protocols, etc.) don't make sense or are much more difficult than they need to be, but sometimes things are so backwards you wonder how anything gets done at all.

h3rmitcrab 14y ago

Lazy people sit on their asses and do nothing. It is the smart people who innovate. Please do not promote the culture of laziness.

pilgrim689 14y ago
I'm totally with you on this. People are confusing laziness with efficiency and smarts. When someone works to make work more efficient, he is still working! By definition, a lazy person is unwilling to work (and that includes work that optimizes work). I'd hire a smart hard-working developer over a smart lazy one any day.
- aggarwalachal 14y ago
  I would definitely hire a smart hard-working developer. But, aren't they little hard to come by? People are lazy because they are not challenged by the things around them.
  - frugalfirbolg 14y ago
    The terms lazy and hard-working are used loosely here. I definitely would hire a smart programmer that's not afraid of doing things the 'hard' way when the constraints of the project demand it, but a programmer that too easily falls into doing it the hard-way may not be considering alternatives that are more maintainable long-term, and I've seen enough people get burned out by marathons of working the hard way that some surveys of the technology and pilot projects before jumping in (or just having an experienced specialist on-board) would have saved lives and careers. The point of this article is that some people are lazy in a different way. They aren't lazy because they aren't challenged. They just appear to be lazy because their hands aren't at the keyboard. They're actually the opposite of lazy because they are tackling the additional challenges of evaluating all of the possibilities and trying to find the most expressive and easiest maintained implementation. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for a quick and dirty hack session, and sometimes you just need to hard-code the stuff to get the first version out the door, but if you have the luxury of making it right the first time, go for it. Just don't forget to counter-point, "Perfect is the enemy of good".

danso 14y ago

I'd rather spend 29 minutes coding a solution to a repetitive 30-minute task, even if it required more brainwork than just going through the motions. At least I'm getting some experience out of the grunt work.

adamio 14y ago
I've found these 29 minute solutions can often be re-purposed and reused beyond the original intent, in even more innovative ways.
- danso 14y ago
  Yep, that goes without saying :). But even if the actual code/module never gets reused, writing something similar will take much less time in the future, even from scratch...which is good because I'm not quite yet lazy enough to abstract code as I write it...
hobin 14y ago
For many tasks, I would even prefer working on a solution for an hour instead of doing grunt work for half that time. Most often, I simply can't stand that kind of work, so I have no problem at all with taking some extra time to do things my way(TM).

jstalin 14y ago

Read the book "Thinking, fast and slow." We are genetically programmed (as are all living things) to conserve energy and make things easier for ourselves. I guess the author could more accurately replace "lazy" with "make things easier" and be more accurate. It drives everything we do as human beings, from politics (read Frederic Bastiat's works) to everyday lives (driving instead of walking to work, choosing to type rather than write a note). It's the people who realize "this could be done more easily" that innovate. I guess lazy is just a simpler way of saying it.

Zenst 14y ago

Lazy people plan more and in that are more likely to find the optimal solution. They also put of things and alot of tasks negate themselfs or were redundant to start with. Manager asking for a report say. You could do it then and drop other things or you could leave it and if it is important you will get chassed up for it. If this happens alot a lazy person will write a script to do it, not tell said manager and gain from it. Others do the script, tell the manager and then get workbombed for no extra return. Lazy is in many ways another word for smart. Thing is though when you say lazy, most people think of poor hygiene, says alot about them mostly.

amix 14y ago

One of my computer scientist professors once said: "A good computer scientist solves problems. A great computer scientist creates tools that solve problems."

kator 14y ago

My physics teacher in high school used to say inventors are insane. They invest 100x the time to solve a problem then it would take to just do the work. But they are so happy when they can do it in 1/10th the time when they have their new invention. Meanwhile everyone watches in horror as the inventor spends all that time looking for the solution thinking how insane the inventor is because they could just "do the work already".

frugalfirbolg 14y ago
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw Hopefully your physics teacher also made a point similar to this: Even if it takes the inventor 10 years to automate something that takes a worker one day to do, it can benefit everyone in the long run if that task is done often and on a large scale.

b_emery 14y ago

> The one who invented multiplication did not want to add numbers all life Reminds me of favorite fact from 'The Information'. The original use of logarithms was by human 'computers', literally, people paid to run the calculations to fill tables, which were then printed and sold in books. They used them to turn difficult multiplication and division problems into simpler addition and subtraction (reducing error and effort apparently). Sometimes I think math should be taught with much more historical context!

zerohp 14y ago
My college professors did a pretty good job of giving some historical context to new ideas when they are presented, but I really wish there was a review class that gave historical context to all of the ideas from arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
tikhonj 14y ago
It's funny because I recently used logarithms for exactly that, just on a computer. Basically, if you're using a naive Bayes classifier, you may have to multiply really small probabilities. Floating point numbers are not great at multiplying really small numbers. So the trick is to take the logarithm of the probabilities and add them together.
- b_emery 14y ago
  Very cool! Would not have thought of that.

arihant 14y ago

Innovation comes more from impatient people, not lazy people. There is very wide gap between impatient and the lazy. The guy who invented multiplication wasn't lazy (as mentioned in the article, or else he won't do work for invention, which is always harder than adding numbers), but he probably did it because he couldn't wait long enough for all the answers he wanted.

mitchi 14y ago

<< Used Autohotkey to automate saving porn images to disk with Google Chrome. Programmer laziness = You are doing something that annoys you because it's slow so you take a whole day scripting and automating something that accelerates it. Ofc, didn't take me a day to do that.

frugalfirbolg 14y ago
lol I have to ask, were you just using mouse-clicks, or did you have it pop open the inspector and pull the images from there? Since you're on Windows, you might want to check out the System.Net.WebClient object in Powershell.

satori99 14y ago

Heinlen did it already... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_o...

soyabean 14y ago

I'm reminded of the quote: "If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness must be the father"

supergrowth 14y ago

We at www.RealEstateDealStreet.com think that it is not laziness make them innovative but time they spent on thinking make them innovative and lay man thinks that thinking as laziness.