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"industrious" does not been intelligent. "Industrious" means hard-working. No, I would not say Alan was smart, because he ended up writing a product with half t

"industrious" does not been intelligent. "Industrious" means hard-working. No, I would not say Alan was smart, because he ended up writing a product with half the functionality, triple the amount of bugs, quintuple the amount of code, and quadruple the amount of employees. He didn't engineer the solution to minimize costs, maintenance, and simplicity while maximizing functionality. He just jumped into writing code thinking he knew best. So, to re-iterate, he's an idiot (compared to Charles). "great hackers use their brains and write great code to solve their problems with the absolute minimum amount of work". Sorry, but I disagree. Just because, in the parable, Charles' solution ended up being the better one, that does not mean that all solutions with less code and less work are "greater" (remember, it's just a parable). Sometimes, you need extra work to make the solution more stable, more maintainable, more bug-free, etc. Great hackers recognize these situations and do the extra work and planning to come up with an elegant design when necessary. I would never hire someone who always does the "absolute minimum amount of work", because if it's a poor solution, we'll end up doing more work later (fixing bugs, refactoring, debugging, etc.).

Shamanmuni 14y ago
In the first paragraph you just repeated what I said. Yeah, Alan is an idiot, but you can only conclude that comparing him with Charles. Otherwise he just behave as any corporate developer is expected to. In the second paragraph, we have a problem of semantics. If you need to do some work in order to have a more stable, maintable and bug-free solution, it's not extra at all, just the necessary amount to avoid doing even more work in the future. By planning carefully you are actually avoiding rewrites, bug hunting, failures and maintenance problems. In other words: future work. And I think that identifying the problem and its best solution from the start will always reduce the total amount of work in the long run. Always. As both of us are saying, a poor solution means more work. So, someone who truly wants to do the absolute minimum amount of work required should never build a poor solution intentionally. It's not the truly lazy thing to do. They are not as lazy as us, lazy people for real, they just want to avoid work in the present ;P If you want to work less, then get the problem right and build a wonderful solution that should not present complications in the future. I know it's not a foolproof method, it's a bit ideallistic, has many grey (and black) areas, but for me it's a great principle to follow at work.

Shamanmuni 14y ago

In the first paragraph you just repeated what I said. Yeah, Alan is an idiot, but you can only conclude that comparing him with Charles. Otherwise he just behave as any corporate developer is expected to. In the second paragraph, we have a problem of semantics. If you need to do some work in order to have a more stable, maintable and bug-free solution, it's not extra at all, just the necessary amount to avoid doing even more work in the future. By planning carefully you are actually avoiding rewrites, bug hunting, failures and maintenance problems. In other words: future work. And I think that identifying the problem and its best solution from the start will always reduce the total amount of work in the long run. Always. As both of us are saying, a poor solution means more work. So, someone who truly wants to do the absolute minimum amount of work required should never build a poor solution intentionally. It's not the truly lazy thing to do. They are not as lazy as us, lazy people for real, they just want to avoid work in the present ;P If you want to work less, then get the problem right and build a wonderful solution that should not present complications in the future. I know it's not a foolproof method, it's a bit ideallistic, has many grey (and black) areas, but for me it's a great principle to follow at work.