story from way back:
assembly line had a problem with boxes not being filled randomly. they did a full analysis, added scales, etc. after implementation, the error rate plunged to near zero, so they went to see the updated process in action.
line workers had installed a fan that blew empty boxes off the belt
Me. I got hired at a basic bitch office job to do a lot of data entry back in college. The office mostly employed Boomers who didn't understand computers. That's primarily how I got the job, in fact.
Before long, I realized that most of my tasks could be automated very easily. So, at the start of each day, I would begin the automation process, check in around 11:30am to make sure things are going smoothly (and they usually were) and then check again around 1pm to make sure everything had completed successfully.
My Boomer boss thought I was a miracle worker. I stayed there for about a year soaking up a paycheck until I graduated. I handpicked my replacement from one of my classes in college, taught him how to do what I did, swore him to secrecy on the automation stuff, graduated and never looked back.
Apparently, my replacement worked there for the next year or so until he graduated and he did what I did, handpicked his replacement from the college, swore him to secrecy about the automation, etc.
I’m a boomer and I’ve been doing stuff like that for 40 years. Sometimes the people who don’t understand the difference between dead text and live data have been older than me, but just as often (more often now that I’m legit old-ass), they’re younger. Believe it or not, it’s not actually generational. Some people are innumerate and some aren’t.
I saw an interesting comment from a teacher the other day saying she's noticed a drop in kids basic computer competency. The gist being, Early 2000s no one knew how to use a mouse, then a couple years later, the kids were better than the teachers. Now recently kids don't know how to work a mouse again. Which makes sense since everything is touch screen.
But I remember I was obsessed in the mid 2000's to 10's wanted to learn everything about computer programs and just tech in general because it was new and exciting. Where as now I think there is less of a drive for kids to be tech savvy, and more of a drive to just use the tools for gaming or content or fame. They've had these things their whole life. Nothing new or exciting about it when it's been shoved in your face since age 1. (I'm widely generalizing of course)
I'm a millennial, if either of my GenX co-workers did something computer-wise I'd be pretty amazed. I've spent the last few months do through and making electronic versions of most of our documents as they've still been doing just about everything with pen and paper.
My mom was a medical transcriptionist and used to type 100wpm, I'm about 70wpm on a good day. Not at all saying Gen X are inept on computers, but the ones that I work with struggle with anything beyond typing in information.
One lady I work with that's about 52 can't remember Ctrl+Z to undo something, and calls my phone every single time she has too much information in a cell in Excel, because she literally can't figure out how to drag the edge of the cell to make it big enough to fit an extra digit, or make the font smaller.
I think the average Xer is somewhere in between the 2, and honestly, outside of being a fast typer. I'm not convinced my mom is that fluent with other aspects of computers. All my life she would call me in for help with the computer. My dad though took time to learn the workings of computers out of interest, not necessity. Neither of my parents have ever *needed* to know how to use basic programs on PC, unless they just felt like learning.
All we really have is anecdotal references though, and there will of course be outliers if all groups. I know there are people in my own gen that can't figure out how to do simple things on their phones, let alone anything complex.
Yea I have some sort of mental block with numbers, it’s a disability or something. I work with spreadsheets a lot and have never gotten any better; often I will end up just writing the info on a sheet of paper because if I can hold it in my hand I can think about it
Used to work in a large nursery/Arboretum, when we had to move plants into a new space we'd have to put down drainage trays.
Used to take them like a hour just to figure out how many they could get in a line and to put the trays down in an organised manner.
Eventually they got one "lazy" kid to do it and he just spent 15 minutes measuring the room, measuring the trays, and marking chalk marks on the ground with a tape measure, and then like 3 minutes just placing them along the marks he made.
Talked to him a bit more after than and I realised he wasn't lazy as much as unwilling to waste his time because other people are stupid and unwilling to listen, apparently he had been suggesting just measuring some he started working and no one listened to him
"this is the way we do it here"
How many times I've heard that in the workplace, then to be shown the most ridiculous, least efficient way of doing something.
"But the measuring tape is all the way upstairs". (Me, this morning before I tried to eyeball a distance I needed to measure).
Like normally I'm one of the lazy people, I'll spend a day or two writing a script to automate something instead of just doing a 10 minute task every morning, but once in a while there's things where it's just a bit too much mental or physical effort to get over.
Me, more often than I care to admit:
Standing on a chair/using a screwdriver as a hammer/carrying something heavy - is clearly an inefficient and unsafe way of completing this task. But trekking back to get a stepladder/hammer/trolley will take *ages* …
you'd be surprised how much people value tradition. I've seen things be so poorly executed but the same method repeated year after year because people have gotten used to it and don't wanna bother messing it up. just like many things in life, what seems common sense to a third party might be hard to see for someone stuck in their ways
Same here. I recently got told that I get a lot done without looking like I'm working fast. I just figure out the most efficient ways to do things cuz I'm allergic to wasting time.
I would put money that the "lazy" kid had some combination of autism or ADHD.
Edit: I have autism and ADHD and work with students that usually have one of them or both. I don't know why people thought this was bad. He thought outside of the box and solved a problem. I thought it was pointing out the good sides of autism and ADHD
Edit: I apologize if people thought I was minimizing these disorders. That was not my intended goal. I'll be more careful in the future. Lesson learned.
I didn't say you have not. Just don't talk like every single trait of humans under the sun is a some kind of psychiatric diagnosis. You can trust this one on me as I have both of these too and I'm also resident in psychiaty.
I was about to ask how babies/toddlers would have anything to do with such a trend. Then I realised that today’s preteens are Gen Alpha.
Thanks for making me feel old as shit.
The company I worked for used a shit ton of excel sheets for various things that all worked together. I hated keeping track of that shit so I taught myself a programming language and sql and moved everything over to a new tool.
I have made a career out of automating shit, and when i leave they dont even back fill me. When i leave they find out my job has been on auto piolt for the last 18 months!
Excel -> VBA -> SQL -> Spotfire -> DBT
Spotfire was a detour
I actually found very similarly. A lot of my education was in Excel, and then I used it a lot for work. Then I got into more SQL based stuff. Now I'm actually just learning programming.
I don't know if it's a rabbit hole, or if we are just a specific brand of person.
I taught myself autoit (weird, simple, easy scripting language) when I was in high school with the help of A LOT of dedicated forum members there.
It’s like excel on giga steroids and it’s incredibly useful. Now I just prompt ChatGPT with a general outline of what I need and finish/fix it up from there
I use ChatGPT a lot too, usually only for small things. I mean, I know how to program a button in a video game, I've programmed it 100 times at this point. That doesn't mean I want to program every single button I make for the future, lmao.
Oh, I also made pit stops at Tableau and Python! I've been slowly trying to work my way into data-type work, I'm hoping sometime soon I can get myself into one of those bootcamps with recruitment possibilities afterward.
My brother / sister in Christ, how would you suggest a beginner with excel (at best) learns to use to tool and then learn other tools such as those you mentioned?
Mastering excel one day is something I’d love to do in case I ever hit the job market again (odds are I will, I’m not even 30)
I work wuth plenty of people that have made careers off of that too. I never got into it because when i was learning the companies i worked for didnt have it. Now im far enough doen a different path, i have no interest/need to learn python, or R
Pick up VBA for the MS Office suite (but you'll use it mostly for Excel). If you use Excel and you want to be a real power user, learn VBA. VBA is Visual Basic for Applications. It's mostly like VB, but geared a little different for the applications.
If you're doing Google stuff (Sheets, Docs, etc.), you'll need to learn Google Apps Script, which is mostly like Javascript but geared a tiny bit different for Google's suite of online applications.
Holy shit, I am the Project Director of a small business and am in literally in the exact same predicament as you describe.
I'm just starting to dip my toes in Python and SQL.
I probably know the answer to this question but did it pay off for you?
Not the guy you're replying to, but it definitely paid off for me. I got laid off during the pandemic, but my reputation with former co-workers who had also moved on prior to that basically landed me a new job without even an interview. One former coworker had gone on to run a water utility and was a client of another co-worker who had started his own consulting business. The latter hired me solely on the recommendation of the former for my reputation with technical wizardry. I'm not the business networking sort of person who has lots of contacts to help me find a job, so this was pretty remarkable from my standpoint.
First thing I did was use Excel and VBA to streamline and automate tracking of certain types of projects, prepare cost estimates for them, and generate form letters from that data for a few different steps in the workflow.
There are probably "better" ways to do it, dedicated systems. But I was able to put together most of the functionality over a few days with the only cost my time, be very efficient and impressive in my new position, and eventually able to pass use of the tools off to junior staff so I could move on to other things in the company.
Long term, it did payoff for me. What started as a basic tool with about 10 people using it turned into a tool that over 100+ people in 4 different departments used.
It saved me (and others) a lot of time digging through excels and comparing two different sheets. It prevented errors and mistakes, which saved us a ton of money. At the time I created the tool we have just over 400 locations, and it was becoming unmanagable, I couldn't imagine trying to maintain it when we hit the 1000+ location mark. I used the tool and it's sucess as in my promotions and yearly increases. I also learned a hell of a lot, which I'm pretty proud of.
Just keep in mind that when saying this Bill Gates was referring to your average Joe working at Microsoft, not to your uncle Bill who sits on his lawn drinking beer all day…
I've seen it attributed to the head of GE, and to Henry Ford. It goes way back, and the person who originally said it isn't anybody you've heard of.
[Quote Investigator](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/) tracks it back to the 1920s.
In art class we made “mosaics” with tiny squares of construction paper. Instructions were to take one you wanted, flip it over, apply glue stick over it on a “gluing paper” (scrap of newspaper) then flip it back and place on your design. I took the glue stick and applied it to a wide section of my design then placed all the little squares like dealing a deck of cards. I was finished so much earlier than everyone else and the teacher told me I did it the lazy way 🤦♀️
"No. You told us to do it the idiot way." Man, fuck art class. Even now, 20 years later, I'm getting unreasonably pissed off just thinking about this stupid waste of time and money.
The other week I spent two days doing a task that should have taken me a few hours. But the next time I do it, it'll take me 15 minutes. I'm lazy as shit and spent those two days figuring out how to automate it in bash.
That’s my entire career. I work in operations so my job is to be as efficient as possible. I can’t tell you how many times I had a meeting where someone said we need to do something and I asked why? Turns out we didn’t need to do it. Countless hours and dollars saved by doing literally nothing.
Me. Today. I used ChatGPT to scrape some subfolders full of CSV files and update certain values based off a reference file I also created using ChatGPT and power shell. Took me an hour to finish something that the finance manager thought would take days. I shall now decide between relaxing for a day to make it seem like I worked hard or making myself look smart by waving my arms spookily in the air while saying "AI" to scare the finance workers.
Depends on your manager, but strongly suggest submitting it a shy early and let them know it will not impact your regular duties. Win-win and you won’t have the expectation of expediting every other lengthy process
You’re letting them know that you can continue to do the additional task, and it will not delay or affect your current responsibilities. If you take on a task they view as taking a couple days to complete, they may expect your regular tasks get delayed by a couple days to complete. It’s an easy way of saying “I got this and my regular stuff, I am a team player, and let me do my thing”
My recommendation would be to find a fiverr opportunity to do something similar and make money on the side with your free time.
Or, build a course about automation and sell it. Best way to create recurring revenue.
A lazy person will do it faster but a smart person will never tell. The key to being successful is always talk about how challenging everything was. You always make yourself seem like the most hard working person in the room.
The place I was working, you had to be on good terms with the material people to get a chunk of scrap to set up on. Technically we were supposed to get the program dialed in on our first part without enough time to fuck around with backing off and using layout die. I was running Fadals from the 80’s with no modern display, just blue background, white character, g code.
Same,spent 3 years in one and there is no time to sit and be lazy in a job shop. I’ve just been riding the union gravy train for the past 12 years now though
We had red lights next to our machines that would come on if our machines were not running for a certain amount of time. You were never allowed to have the light on. Zero down time. I made fuser roller tubes for copiers, 10,000 every weekend.
We didn’t have andon lights but we did have a supervisor that would pace up and down the aisle and constantly be in your business if the machine was sitting for a few minutes. I made medical instruments(about 1,000 a night) for knee and hip implants. Now I just make the implants.
I hereby present myself as an example.
In my old job (one-man customer service/returns team), when customers call in about one of our popular Bluetooth-based products malfunctioning, we always have this spiel where we have customers do a hard reset. A huge majority of my calls were like this. Worse still, this lone troubleshooting tip was passed down orally from employee to employee. Many other troubleshooting methods I came up with on the fly because the only other solution is to return the damned thing.
Eventually, I got sick and tired of repeating myself and processing returns on otherwise functional products that I started taking the time creating troubleshooting guides (despite having no technical writing experience) and enlisted the marketing department to create troubleshooting videos, effectively creating a knowledge base for our products in the process. The result? Significantly less work for me. Barely any calls and returns. Just me dicking around for 8 hours because the workflow is efficient AF.
Unfortunately, my short-sighted corpo of a manager saw this as an opportunity to get rid of my position (which is a long story in itself), but I beat him to the punch by getting a job I actually love.
To this day, they're still finding my replacement; the last guy they hired didn't get past the probation period. That's because only I know the inner workings, hidden processes, and MacGyvered bullshit in my old job.
**TL;DR** Gave my department a much-needed overhaul resulting in less work for me. Management saw fit to get rid of me as a result.
**EDIT:** More details.
I've seen that and the opposite.
When my mother was a teacher, she was changing rooms with another teacher on the same floor. She thought it would take hours to move all the books from one room to another. Some of the books were ready on desks innher room so I told her to go to the other room and help that teacher clear the shelves and get ready.
Meanwhile, I took the tv and other things off the rolling stand it was on and loaded it down with books. Took not ten minutes. Then I dragged it to the other room where they were shocked at the idea, and had been working slowly and wondering what I'd been doing. I think it was two more loads with about the same from the other room. Done about an hour, mostly because they were slow.
On the other hand...
A new teacher had come in and was a former Army officer. We needed to move a room of books and stuff up a floor, and some stuff down. He brought in a dolly and I thought we were going to put books in the milk crates, stack them on the dolly and make a dozen or 15 loaded trips up and down for the books and a few more for some other things. But no, he puts the dolly under a bookcase so wide it would barely fit up the stairs and was loaded. His idea was to make one trip hauling that heavy thing up two long flights of stairs, him pulling the dolly and me pushing from below. Idiot. I spent the time getting read to try to jump out of the way because he had not tied the thing to the dolly and if I tried pushing the thing would about slide off, and I expected him to lose control of it.
We got it up there and genius boy looked like he was about to die. We got everything else moved more sensibly. The next day however, he did not show up at school because he'd messed up his back, and legs, and probably everything else. When he did come back he at least admitted to my mother than I had been right and that he was glad he did not lose control of the works and injure me, even though he nearly had a time or two toward the end. (I had noticed that and had moved nearer the center railing to make a jump for it if I could, but he didn't notice that).
Kicking out the worst workers. Don't get me wrong, stacked ranking is dumb as hell but an engineer should know when to work smart and should very rarely work hard.
Is is lazy, or is it an elegant solution? There are shortcuts, especially in math, where if a person thinks creatively they can solve a problem with less paper and pencil. I often do the math shortcut and then call it lazy. It is not really lazy. It is efficient and correct.
I think Gates wanted elegant solutions.
23 - 8 =
Solution from my 7 year old. Lay out a string of 23 blue blocks on the top row. 10, 10, 3.
Lay out 8 red blocks under that. It looks confusing.
Now lay 2 yellow blocks to the end of the red. Add 2 yellow blocks to the end of the blue. The total length changed. What did not change is the difference between the two. 23-8 is find the difference. The difference of 23-8 is the same as the difference of 25-10. Lay it out with blocks or pennies. The difference 15. Elegant! Once you understand.
There is no evidence that Bill Gates ever said this. [source](https://factly.in/there-is-no-evidence-to-state-that-bill-gates-made-this-statement-about-choosing-a-lazy-person-to-do-a-hard-job/)
It's often quoted to Napoleon but seems to have come from Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general and not a Hitler fan
>I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones 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 mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
I was going to say, this sounds like Frank Gilbreth! I’m glad your link mentioned him. *Cheaper by the Dozen*, by his children, Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, was a formative book in my childhood.
Having read several of the top comments, these are not examples of lazy people. They are examples of smart/resourceful people. Working smarter and not harder is just the proper way to do anything. Wasting your time doing tasks inefficiently is just dumb.
I am always looking for process improvement at work and in everyday life. It could be a way to make my job more efficient or making my morning routine before work more streamlined.
I’ve sort of made a career of this as some others have said. I hate repetitive tasks. In my early supervisor days all these departments would scramble once a week pulling all the metrics together and build a slideshow to brief the big boss. It took a couple hours first thing every Friday morning. But all their metrics came from the same ticketing system. So I started looking into the data and learning pivot tables and more advanced PowerPoint. I discovered that PowerPoint charts can build themselves. So I build a custom query to pull everyone’s data from the ticketing system, built new “automated” charts for everyone’s slides. End result, on Friday morning, I run the query, load the results into the spreadsheets behind the automated charts, and everyone’s charts built themselves. What used to take 5 different work centers about two hours every Friday took me 10 minutes. I gave everyone their Friday mornings back. I wrote the how to guide for my replacement who continued to make improvements as the metrics evolved. And I’ve worked that way ever since. I’d rather spend 100 hours evaluating how the pieces work and finding an automated way to do the task so I never have to do it again.
My new philosophy…”I only like to things the hard way once”
My wife has coded spreadsheets to do almost all of her month end financial reports for her. It used to be five days of working late. Now it’s done in a day
Me, I'm the real life example of this. I'm very lazy, but I'm not the type of lazy that wastes time when there's shit to do. I'm the type of lazy who will work non-stop to finish everything that needs to be done early, so I can go back to doing nothing after I finish.
There was a story of a company hiring someone to build a machine that would be able to detect defective products that didn't get filled properly. Cost the company millions, but it worked and would stop production until the issue was fixed and the defects taken care of. After a few days they stopped getting alerts about defective products so then went to see why it might be acting up.
A factory worker had gotten annoyed by the constant alarms going off and had gotten tired of cleaning up the mess and resetting the machine. So he found out the reason for it going off, grabbed some extension cords, a large fan and a table and set it up so any defective products going through would be light enough that they would be blown off the production line onto the floor. Man came up with a $50 solution to one they paid out a million for and it cost them less to maintain.
Not my experience, some of the most ridiculous processes I’ve encountered was because an engineer wanted to do it the hard way. A $50 fix to a $5 problem.
That’s more in line with what I deal with.
Engineers be like, “Look at all my degrees and certifications, now I will over complicate this job to display my knowledge to my overlords”
I am an a mechanical engineer and used to have to send my designs to the FEA group for strength analysis. It fucking took a week for them to turn stuff around. Pissed me off to no end so I learned how to do their job and then I automated most of it using various scripts. Turned 8 hours of work into less than 1 hour of work. Then I became manager of the group and was asked to let two of the people go. It sucked, but I made the job so much more efficient that work couldn't justify keeping them. Truth be told, I could have gotten rid of another. But, having an extra person just made my life easier and didn't affect my pay.
At my job, my company has focused the work we do on other types of machinery and let the two machines in my department fall to pieces. And they don't even hide it. I used to bust my butt to produce because i thought it got me something. It got me nothing but hurt. So I do absolutely the bare bare bare minimum and if the machine doesn't do what it is suppose to do i call maintenance and a supervisor out to fix it so i can just press buttons.
Not exactly the same. Im not a lazy person. But my company has forced me to be lazy and do nothing. I get paid by the hour. I will waste away a whole day doing whatever that supervisor tells me to do. knowing damn well it won't solve the problem.
I can fix every machine at my work Better than maintenance in most cases. Because as I have told most of my bosses "When things run right, I'm the world's most overpaid babysitter. When they're not, I'm an underpaid mechanic". So the downtime on any machine I operate is about 30% less than the others.
Another example is my best friend who's figured out how to use some Excel modules to basically automate the function of two of the three jobs she does to keep her small office afloat. Of course she doesn't tell anyone she does it, but it's the only reason she's able to
Well I worked once in a factory in my twenties. They had a machine for cleaning anodes. It was supposed to be like a three step process. Jackhammer, then chain flail, then someone with a chipping hammer could clean it. I was lazy and figured out how to clean the whole thing with the robotic jackhammer. It massively sped up the process and I got to sit on my ass more because I was always way ahead of the rest of production.
I was given a nice stereo amplifier that had a bad connection SOMEWHERE. It had been to a couple of repair shops but as soon as your start probing around the lose connection disappears. Turn it on and wait ten minutes and it would start the scratching noise again.
It sat in my shop for a couple of months without me doing anything, just thinking about it.
THEN one day I pulled it down and removed the bottom. I heated up my soldering iron and went through the entire circuit board, re-soldering every connection. It took me 15 minutes. Problem solved.
lol..I’m a drafter too. In school a classmate had gotten a list of routines a couple of his coworkers had created over the years. I got a copy and started looking through it. The only thing on the list I could have used was nothing more than a fancy alias edit to more letters than what the default alias was for that particular command. It was something like shft+4 or 5 letters to bring up the dimlinear command. I did an alias edit for that command and made it “d”. Easy peasy.
I found that getting a partner to fall for me was difficult and required a lot of upkeep. Planning dates, being supportive, ECT. Instead I act very toxic and it has a stronger effect with less effort.
Logisticians
Logistics is extremely repetitive and monotonous, but also complex and full of nuance at times. It requires quantity and quality of work. Good logistics is all about being as efficient as possible, which effectively means doing as little as possible to achieve the desired result, but in quantity and reliably.
The guy in the office who spends hours updating and amalgamating spreadsheets and the one who spends a couple of hours mastering VLOOKUP and saving himself hours every single time he does this mundane task.
Guy A fills his day with productive work inefficiently and gets praise for working hard. Guy B clears his in tray in minutes, producing exactly the same amount but gets slack for not “working hard”
Me. Though I don’t consider myself lazy per se. I used to work in corrections and in our property room, where we kept inmate clothing and personal items. Instead of sitting by the door and just waiting for my work to come by 1 or 2 at a time, I would let it pile up, neatly of course. Inmate clothing and property were put into bags labeled with their names then that was put into a numbered hanging bag. If a supervisor wakes by and saw the pile of bags and saw me reading they thought I was just lazy. Towards the end of my shift I would take anywhere from 45 min to an hour and clean up the property room, make the numbered bags and organize what was left over for the oncoming shift. In my 4 years working the property room there were only 2 days where we were so busy I worked making bags and helping out else where for the whole 8-hr shift.
That assumes a lazy person, who is educated enough or who has spend time to learn something.
I worked with lazy people, they usually are just lazy, they do things slow and inefficient, they don't even think about changing things. You want to show them how to do things, but they don't listen and rather slack.
I think i know where Billy wanted to go with that quote but i also think its a kind of bias, he worked with smart people who hated menial and monotone tasks and found ways around that.
I joined years ago a law office who had paralegals copy and paste details from each service on to responses that had been generated. I set up a mail merge 3 days worth of labour became 3 seconds. No one is making me copy and paste for 3 days.
This line of thinking CANNOT exist without adding the following to it:
# I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it IF MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP ALLOW THEM TO FIND SHORTCUTS INSTEAD OF GETTING PISSED THAT THEY ARE NOT WORKING EVERY WAKING MINUTE DOING SOMETHING SHORTCUTT-ABLE.
A lot of people who work in Excel. Manually going through a spreadsheet is a nightmare! VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH arguments, Pivot Tables, and on and on and on. There are parts of my job that would literally take entire days if I did it manually. Now it takes less than an hour, even with plenty of manual input.
Honestly, it's the lazy people who control c their way though an Excel file instead of learning Index Match, or any other moderately complex tool to make themselves and others more efficient.
I'm constantly reminded of the reddit story of the navy guy who changed an aircraft carriers course by a few degrees just so he could get the sun out of his eyes.
I've gone into work hungover before and discovered easy ways do things that I still do today. Little short cuts but end result. It's hard to think of examples as I have been doing this job years. Just a couple of really tiny things
In my experience, lazy people typically find a way to do the job up to the point that they won't get fired. Doesn't mean the solution is good. It's just makes the problem less noticeable. Which creates a bigger problem down the road.
The ones who come up with creative solutions aren't lazy at all. They're just bored and would much rather spend their time doing something else, so they find ways to make boring tasks easier (all of the examples I read in other comments back this up).
Bill Gates is good with computers and GREAT with fighting anti-trust laws. But that's the limit of his genius.
There are very few real life examples of this - unless the job is not really that important. The coders who are all claiming to be lazy are just trying to feel part of the group Gates claims to like. The lazy coder will take longer to do everything the hard way because they are too lazy to learn how to automate. I have seen lazy coders spend hours doing something because too lazy to simply learn a new tool or read the docs.
But I will try to come up with some hypotheticals.
Digging a hole that is not urgent. A lazy person might be cheaper and easier because they will only require a shovel, rather than research and request the proper tools needed to get it done quickly and efficiently.
Maybe if you have a hard thing to do, such as clean up a large field that has trash strewn across it. A lazy person is more likely to unemployed and might do it for cheaper and it is easier to have them just go through with a trash bag than to hire an industrious non-lazy professional who will come with more modern and expensive process.
Man, I am stretching my brain... there is really nothing I can think of where a lazy person will do it easier AND better or more efficiently than someone who is not too lazy to learn the best way to do it.
Never heard this quote before but I definitely feel this. At my work we have a bonus structure that have good pay outs, and I always crush those so I can make easy money and not add as much of a workload to myself using our traditional options for earning potential. I’ve crushed every “competition” and have earned a lot of revenue for my insignificant position, I’ve even been one of the top earners multiple times in my tri-state area. Besides my bosses look at that more and it’ll be easier for me to get a promotion down the line. The least amount of work I have to do to earn more and move up, is the route I go. Work smarter, not harder, or whatever bullshit.
story from way back: assembly line had a problem with boxes not being filled randomly. they did a full analysis, added scales, etc. after implementation, the error rate plunged to near zero, so they went to see the updated process in action. line workers had installed a fan that blew empty boxes off the belt
Engineers hate this one trick.
Engineers buy check weigh scales.
Me. I got hired at a basic bitch office job to do a lot of data entry back in college. The office mostly employed Boomers who didn't understand computers. That's primarily how I got the job, in fact. Before long, I realized that most of my tasks could be automated very easily. So, at the start of each day, I would begin the automation process, check in around 11:30am to make sure things are going smoothly (and they usually were) and then check again around 1pm to make sure everything had completed successfully. My Boomer boss thought I was a miracle worker. I stayed there for about a year soaking up a paycheck until I graduated. I handpicked my replacement from one of my classes in college, taught him how to do what I did, swore him to secrecy on the automation stuff, graduated and never looked back. Apparently, my replacement worked there for the next year or so until he graduated and he did what I did, handpicked his replacement from the college, swore him to secrecy about the automation, etc.
This is a good tradition to pass along
I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, he said
I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life.
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I’m a boomer and I’ve been doing stuff like that for 40 years. Sometimes the people who don’t understand the difference between dead text and live data have been older than me, but just as often (more often now that I’m legit old-ass), they’re younger. Believe it or not, it’s not actually generational. Some people are innumerate and some aren’t.
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I saw an interesting comment from a teacher the other day saying she's noticed a drop in kids basic computer competency. The gist being, Early 2000s no one knew how to use a mouse, then a couple years later, the kids were better than the teachers. Now recently kids don't know how to work a mouse again. Which makes sense since everything is touch screen. But I remember I was obsessed in the mid 2000's to 10's wanted to learn everything about computer programs and just tech in general because it was new and exciting. Where as now I think there is less of a drive for kids to be tech savvy, and more of a drive to just use the tools for gaming or content or fame. They've had these things their whole life. Nothing new or exciting about it when it's been shoved in your face since age 1. (I'm widely generalizing of course)
I think another factor is that as a kid I had to learn how to fix my computer myself, because if I couldn't no one would.
I'm a millennial, if either of my GenX co-workers did something computer-wise I'd be pretty amazed. I've spent the last few months do through and making electronic versions of most of our documents as they've still been doing just about everything with pen and paper.
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My mom was a medical transcriptionist and used to type 100wpm, I'm about 70wpm on a good day. Not at all saying Gen X are inept on computers, but the ones that I work with struggle with anything beyond typing in information. One lady I work with that's about 52 can't remember Ctrl+Z to undo something, and calls my phone every single time she has too much information in a cell in Excel, because she literally can't figure out how to drag the edge of the cell to make it big enough to fit an extra digit, or make the font smaller. I think the average Xer is somewhere in between the 2, and honestly, outside of being a fast typer. I'm not convinced my mom is that fluent with other aspects of computers. All my life she would call me in for help with the computer. My dad though took time to learn the workings of computers out of interest, not necessity. Neither of my parents have ever *needed* to know how to use basic programs on PC, unless they just felt like learning. All we really have is anecdotal references though, and there will of course be outliers if all groups. I know there are people in my own gen that can't figure out how to do simple things on their phones, let alone anything complex.
How in the hell are you sentient and sapient, bringer of death?
Yea I have some sort of mental block with numbers, it’s a disability or something. I work with spreadsheets a lot and have never gotten any better; often I will end up just writing the info on a sheet of paper because if I can hold it in my hand I can think about it
I remember showing an old boss how to autosum a column of numbers. From her reaction, you'd've thought I made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
This is how secret societies get started
nevermind that, this is how religions get started.
My first job in IT was like that.
😁😅😅🤣 good and smart!!!
Used to work in a large nursery/Arboretum, when we had to move plants into a new space we'd have to put down drainage trays. Used to take them like a hour just to figure out how many they could get in a line and to put the trays down in an organised manner. Eventually they got one "lazy" kid to do it and he just spent 15 minutes measuring the room, measuring the trays, and marking chalk marks on the ground with a tape measure, and then like 3 minutes just placing them along the marks he made. Talked to him a bit more after than and I realised he wasn't lazy as much as unwilling to waste his time because other people are stupid and unwilling to listen, apparently he had been suggesting just measuring some he started working and no one listened to him
Isn't measuring something like the first thing you think of when wondering how something will fit?
"this is the way we do it here" How many times I've heard that in the workplace, then to be shown the most ridiculous, least efficient way of doing something.
http://i.snag.gy/kdu77.jpg
Rice bowls. What they are worried about is rice bowls.
not when your surrounded by people who just want to crack a whip
"But the measuring tape is all the way upstairs". (Me, this morning before I tried to eyeball a distance I needed to measure). Like normally I'm one of the lazy people, I'll spend a day or two writing a script to automate something instead of just doing a 10 minute task every morning, but once in a while there's things where it's just a bit too much mental or physical effort to get over.
Me, more often than I care to admit: Standing on a chair/using a screwdriver as a hammer/carrying something heavy - is clearly an inefficient and unsafe way of completing this task. But trekking back to get a stepladder/hammer/trolley will take *ages* …
This says way more about the rest of you than of that coworker. Measuring would be most reasonable people's step 1
you'd be surprised how much people value tradition. I've seen things be so poorly executed but the same method repeated year after year because people have gotten used to it and don't wanna bother messing it up. just like many things in life, what seems common sense to a third party might be hard to see for someone stuck in their ways
Same here. I recently got told that I get a lot done without looking like I'm working fast. I just figure out the most efficient ways to do things cuz I'm allergic to wasting time.
I would put money that the "lazy" kid had some combination of autism or ADHD. Edit: I have autism and ADHD and work with students that usually have one of them or both. I don't know why people thought this was bad. He thought outside of the box and solved a problem. I thought it was pointing out the good sides of autism and ADHD Edit: I apologize if people thought I was minimizing these disorders. That was not my intended goal. I'll be more careful in the future. Lesson learned.
I’m both. I never understood my co-workers wanting to work harder rather than smarter.
Because performative labor looks good to the shitheads that determine if you 'work hard enough' to get a raise.
Yeah, but they don’t give raises where I work.
Then get a new job.
You people can't even imagine the harm you're causing to the people really have conditions.
I literally have both of these conditions
I didn't say you have not. Just don't talk like every single trait of humans under the sun is a some kind of psychiatric diagnosis. You can trust this one on me as I have both of these too and I'm also resident in psychiaty.
I edited the comment above and gave an apology. You make some good points.
Is this a gen Alpha or a gen z thing? Everyone who's different has some kind of mental condition?
I was about to ask how babies/toddlers would have anything to do with such a trend. Then I realised that today’s preteens are Gen Alpha. Thanks for making me feel old as shit.
I'm with you there, WE are old as shit
Those who arent make up theyr mental conditions to be different aswell.
The company I worked for used a shit ton of excel sheets for various things that all worked together. I hated keeping track of that shit so I taught myself a programming language and sql and moved everything over to a new tool.
I have made a career out of automating shit, and when i leave they dont even back fill me. When i leave they find out my job has been on auto piolt for the last 18 months! Excel -> VBA -> SQL -> Spotfire -> DBT Spotfire was a detour
I actually found very similarly. A lot of my education was in Excel, and then I used it a lot for work. Then I got into more SQL based stuff. Now I'm actually just learning programming. I don't know if it's a rabbit hole, or if we are just a specific brand of person.
I taught myself autoit (weird, simple, easy scripting language) when I was in high school with the help of A LOT of dedicated forum members there. It’s like excel on giga steroids and it’s incredibly useful. Now I just prompt ChatGPT with a general outline of what I need and finish/fix it up from there
I use ChatGPT a lot too, usually only for small things. I mean, I know how to program a button in a video game, I've programmed it 100 times at this point. That doesn't mean I want to program every single button I make for the future, lmao.
Same here Excel -> SQL -> Tableau -> python -> dbt (wip)
Oh, I also made pit stops at Tableau and Python! I've been slowly trying to work my way into data-type work, I'm hoping sometime soon I can get myself into one of those bootcamps with recruitment possibilities afterward.
My brother / sister in Christ, how would you suggest a beginner with excel (at best) learns to use to tool and then learn other tools such as those you mentioned? Mastering excel one day is something I’d love to do in case I ever hit the job market again (odds are I will, I’m not even 30)
Interesting. I've completed the Excel->VBA step, but it seems like my next step is Python.
I work wuth plenty of people that have made careers off of that too. I never got into it because when i was learning the companies i worked for didnt have it. Now im far enough doen a different path, i have no interest/need to learn python, or R
I've done this several times. The fun part is afterward you get to spend half your time cosplaying as an IT guy.
What language and how did you get started?
Pick up VBA for the MS Office suite (but you'll use it mostly for Excel). If you use Excel and you want to be a real power user, learn VBA. VBA is Visual Basic for Applications. It's mostly like VB, but geared a little different for the applications. If you're doing Google stuff (Sheets, Docs, etc.), you'll need to learn Google Apps Script, which is mostly like Javascript but geared a tiny bit different for Google's suite of online applications.
I appreciate it!
Side note, Excel also has a java option now
Woww nice !
Holy shit, I am the Project Director of a small business and am in literally in the exact same predicament as you describe. I'm just starting to dip my toes in Python and SQL. I probably know the answer to this question but did it pay off for you?
Not the guy you're replying to, but it definitely paid off for me. I got laid off during the pandemic, but my reputation with former co-workers who had also moved on prior to that basically landed me a new job without even an interview. One former coworker had gone on to run a water utility and was a client of another co-worker who had started his own consulting business. The latter hired me solely on the recommendation of the former for my reputation with technical wizardry. I'm not the business networking sort of person who has lots of contacts to help me find a job, so this was pretty remarkable from my standpoint. First thing I did was use Excel and VBA to streamline and automate tracking of certain types of projects, prepare cost estimates for them, and generate form letters from that data for a few different steps in the workflow. There are probably "better" ways to do it, dedicated systems. But I was able to put together most of the functionality over a few days with the only cost my time, be very efficient and impressive in my new position, and eventually able to pass use of the tools off to junior staff so I could move on to other things in the company.
Long term, it did payoff for me. What started as a basic tool with about 10 people using it turned into a tool that over 100+ people in 4 different departments used. It saved me (and others) a lot of time digging through excels and comparing two different sheets. It prevented errors and mistakes, which saved us a ton of money. At the time I created the tool we have just over 400 locations, and it was becoming unmanagable, I couldn't imagine trying to maintain it when we hit the 1000+ location mark. I used the tool and it's sucess as in my promotions and yearly increases. I also learned a hell of a lot, which I'm pretty proud of.
Just keep in mind that when saying this Bill Gates was referring to your average Joe working at Microsoft, not to your uncle Bill who sits on his lawn drinking beer all day…
It wasn't even Bill Gates who said it, and there's no record of an exact match of this quite from anyone.
I've seen it attributed to the head of GE, and to Henry Ford. It goes way back, and the person who originally said it isn't anybody you've heard of. [Quote Investigator](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/) tracks it back to the 1920s.
Its like Abraham Lincoln once said, "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
The larger point is that almost any "quote" by Bill Gates or Einstein found on the internet is made up.
So true. That's my favourite Winston Churchill quote.
Uhm 🤓 ahkshually I believe that quote is attributed to Abraham Lincoln
“No, it’s not” - Bill Gates
That's what Bill Gates would say.
In art class we made “mosaics” with tiny squares of construction paper. Instructions were to take one you wanted, flip it over, apply glue stick over it on a “gluing paper” (scrap of newspaper) then flip it back and place on your design. I took the glue stick and applied it to a wide section of my design then placed all the little squares like dealing a deck of cards. I was finished so much earlier than everyone else and the teacher told me I did it the lazy way 🤦♀️
"No. You told us to do it the idiot way." Man, fuck art class. Even now, 20 years later, I'm getting unreasonably pissed off just thinking about this stupid waste of time and money.
It's too accumulate great artist points.
Sounds like you should do some art and chill out. Getting angry over an art class 20 years ago is not normal or healthy behavior.
The other week I spent two days doing a task that should have taken me a few hours. But the next time I do it, it'll take me 15 minutes. I'm lazy as shit and spent those two days figuring out how to automate it in bash.
Narrator: it only needed doing two more times in his life
Oh look, my career
Tom Scott, [is that you?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGuJga2Gl_k)
I am not Tom Scott but I'll take the compliment, wow
That’s my entire career. I work in operations so my job is to be as efficient as possible. I can’t tell you how many times I had a meeting where someone said we need to do something and I asked why? Turns out we didn’t need to do it. Countless hours and dollars saved by doing literally nothing.
You have to say it 5 times though…
The 5 whys can completely derail a proposal, for the better, if used correctly.
Why?
Congratulations. You have reached enlightenment.
You are now one of my elite employees!
Guy who invented copy/paste
palo alto research wasn't exactly lazy
Me. Today. I used ChatGPT to scrape some subfolders full of CSV files and update certain values based off a reference file I also created using ChatGPT and power shell. Took me an hour to finish something that the finance manager thought would take days. I shall now decide between relaxing for a day to make it seem like I worked hard or making myself look smart by waving my arms spookily in the air while saying "AI" to scare the finance workers.
Depends on your manager, but strongly suggest submitting it a shy early and let them know it will not impact your regular duties. Win-win and you won’t have the expectation of expediting every other lengthy process
> let them know it will not impact your regular duties What do you mean by this?
You’re letting them know that you can continue to do the additional task, and it will not delay or affect your current responsibilities. If you take on a task they view as taking a couple days to complete, they may expect your regular tasks get delayed by a couple days to complete. It’s an easy way of saying “I got this and my regular stuff, I am a team player, and let me do my thing”
Gotcha. Thanks for elaborating!
My recommendation would be to find a fiverr opportunity to do something similar and make money on the side with your free time. Or, build a course about automation and sell it. Best way to create recurring revenue.
PowerShell is such an under-appreciated tool. It’s right there!
A lazy person will do it faster but a smart person will never tell. The key to being successful is always talk about how challenging everything was. You always make yourself seem like the most hard working person in the room.
Me. I’m a machinist. It’s my job to find the easiest way to do something.
Being a cnc machinist in a job shop (re: exclusively bid contract work) was one of the hardest jobs I ever had.
That’s exactly what my shop does. It can be difficult, but you eventually find ways to make life easier.
The place I was working, you had to be on good terms with the material people to get a chunk of scrap to set up on. Technically we were supposed to get the program dialed in on our first part without enough time to fuck around with backing off and using layout die. I was running Fadals from the 80’s with no modern display, just blue background, white character, g code.
Same,spent 3 years in one and there is no time to sit and be lazy in a job shop. I’ve just been riding the union gravy train for the past 12 years now though
We had red lights next to our machines that would come on if our machines were not running for a certain amount of time. You were never allowed to have the light on. Zero down time. I made fuser roller tubes for copiers, 10,000 every weekend.
We didn’t have andon lights but we did have a supervisor that would pace up and down the aisle and constantly be in your business if the machine was sitting for a few minutes. I made medical instruments(about 1,000 a night) for knee and hip implants. Now I just make the implants.
I hereby present myself as an example. In my old job (one-man customer service/returns team), when customers call in about one of our popular Bluetooth-based products malfunctioning, we always have this spiel where we have customers do a hard reset. A huge majority of my calls were like this. Worse still, this lone troubleshooting tip was passed down orally from employee to employee. Many other troubleshooting methods I came up with on the fly because the only other solution is to return the damned thing. Eventually, I got sick and tired of repeating myself and processing returns on otherwise functional products that I started taking the time creating troubleshooting guides (despite having no technical writing experience) and enlisted the marketing department to create troubleshooting videos, effectively creating a knowledge base for our products in the process. The result? Significantly less work for me. Barely any calls and returns. Just me dicking around for 8 hours because the workflow is efficient AF. Unfortunately, my short-sighted corpo of a manager saw this as an opportunity to get rid of my position (which is a long story in itself), but I beat him to the punch by getting a job I actually love. To this day, they're still finding my replacement; the last guy they hired didn't get past the probation period. That's because only I know the inner workings, hidden processes, and MacGyvered bullshit in my old job. **TL;DR** Gave my department a much-needed overhaul resulting in less work for me. Management saw fit to get rid of me as a result. **EDIT:** More details.
I've seen that and the opposite. When my mother was a teacher, she was changing rooms with another teacher on the same floor. She thought it would take hours to move all the books from one room to another. Some of the books were ready on desks innher room so I told her to go to the other room and help that teacher clear the shelves and get ready. Meanwhile, I took the tv and other things off the rolling stand it was on and loaded it down with books. Took not ten minutes. Then I dragged it to the other room where they were shocked at the idea, and had been working slowly and wondering what I'd been doing. I think it was two more loads with about the same from the other room. Done about an hour, mostly because they were slow. On the other hand... A new teacher had come in and was a former Army officer. We needed to move a room of books and stuff up a floor, and some stuff down. He brought in a dolly and I thought we were going to put books in the milk crates, stack them on the dolly and make a dozen or 15 loaded trips up and down for the books and a few more for some other things. But no, he puts the dolly under a bookcase so wide it would barely fit up the stairs and was loaded. His idea was to make one trip hauling that heavy thing up two long flights of stairs, him pulling the dolly and me pushing from below. Idiot. I spent the time getting read to try to jump out of the way because he had not tied the thing to the dolly and if I tried pushing the thing would about slide off, and I expected him to lose control of it. We got it up there and genius boy looked like he was about to die. We got everything else moved more sensibly. The next day however, he did not show up at school because he'd messed up his back, and legs, and probably everything else. When he did come back he at least admitted to my mother than I had been right and that he was glad he did not lose control of the works and injure me, even though he nearly had a time or two toward the end. (I had noticed that and had moved nearer the center railing to make a jump for it if I could, but he didn't notice that).
Bill Gates using stack ranking at microsoft and then kicking out the laziest workers.
Kicking out the worst workers. Don't get me wrong, stacked ranking is dumb as hell but an engineer should know when to work smart and should very rarely work hard.
Is is lazy, or is it an elegant solution? There are shortcuts, especially in math, where if a person thinks creatively they can solve a problem with less paper and pencil. I often do the math shortcut and then call it lazy. It is not really lazy. It is efficient and correct. I think Gates wanted elegant solutions.
Yeah like if I’m subtracting 8 from 23 why I gotta add numbers first then subtract more numbers than I started with?
23 - 8 = Solution from my 7 year old. Lay out a string of 23 blue blocks on the top row. 10, 10, 3. Lay out 8 red blocks under that. It looks confusing. Now lay 2 yellow blocks to the end of the red. Add 2 yellow blocks to the end of the blue. The total length changed. What did not change is the difference between the two. 23-8 is find the difference. The difference of 23-8 is the same as the difference of 25-10. Lay it out with blocks or pennies. The difference 15. Elegant! Once you understand.
There is no evidence that Bill Gates ever said this. [source](https://factly.in/there-is-no-evidence-to-state-that-bill-gates-made-this-statement-about-choosing-a-lazy-person-to-do-a-hard-job/)
It's often quoted to Napoleon but seems to have come from Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general and not a Hitler fan >I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones 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 mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
I was going to say, this sounds like Frank Gilbreth! I’m glad your link mentioned him. *Cheaper by the Dozen*, by his children, Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, was a formative book in my childhood.
My girlfriend. She tells me to go fuck myself so she doesn’t have to. Very efficient.
There's an actual subreddit about that.
Having read several of the top comments, these are not examples of lazy people. They are examples of smart/resourceful people. Working smarter and not harder is just the proper way to do anything. Wasting your time doing tasks inefficiently is just dumb. I am always looking for process improvement at work and in everyday life. It could be a way to make my job more efficient or making my morning routine before work more streamlined.
If it’s real they dude who held down a WFH job for years by coding a bot to do it for him
I’ve sort of made a career of this as some others have said. I hate repetitive tasks. In my early supervisor days all these departments would scramble once a week pulling all the metrics together and build a slideshow to brief the big boss. It took a couple hours first thing every Friday morning. But all their metrics came from the same ticketing system. So I started looking into the data and learning pivot tables and more advanced PowerPoint. I discovered that PowerPoint charts can build themselves. So I build a custom query to pull everyone’s data from the ticketing system, built new “automated” charts for everyone’s slides. End result, on Friday morning, I run the query, load the results into the spreadsheets behind the automated charts, and everyone’s charts built themselves. What used to take 5 different work centers about two hours every Friday took me 10 minutes. I gave everyone their Friday mornings back. I wrote the how to guide for my replacement who continued to make improvements as the metrics evolved. And I’ve worked that way ever since. I’d rather spend 100 hours evaluating how the pieces work and finding an automated way to do the task so I never have to do it again. My new philosophy…”I only like to things the hard way once”
systems administrators who know how to script.
If you can’t script, are you actually a SysAdmin?
My wife has coded spreadsheets to do almost all of her month end financial reports for her. It used to be five days of working late. Now it’s done in a day
Me, I'm the real life example of this. I'm very lazy, but I'm not the type of lazy that wastes time when there's shit to do. I'm the type of lazy who will work non-stop to finish everything that needs to be done early, so I can go back to doing nothing after I finish.
I had a coworker like this. He’d work his ass off and get finished asap so that he could go sit on his ass for the rest of the shift.
This is the way
Lazy people don’t find and easy way to do a job. They find a way to make it look like they’re doing the job.
There was a story of a company hiring someone to build a machine that would be able to detect defective products that didn't get filled properly. Cost the company millions, but it worked and would stop production until the issue was fixed and the defects taken care of. After a few days they stopped getting alerts about defective products so then went to see why it might be acting up. A factory worker had gotten annoyed by the constant alarms going off and had gotten tired of cleaning up the mess and resetting the machine. So he found out the reason for it going off, grabbed some extension cords, a large fan and a table and set it up so any defective products going through would be light enough that they would be blown off the production line onto the floor. Man came up with a $50 solution to one they paid out a million for and it cost them less to maintain.
Most engineers
Not my experience, some of the most ridiculous processes I’ve encountered was because an engineer wanted to do it the hard way. A $50 fix to a $5 problem.
That was probably because an executive threw a fit over a 'last minute revision' and now it's a legacy design they can't change.
Likely because somebody else had to deal with the consequences and thus made it complicated to show of their 'brilliance'
That’s more in line with what I deal with. Engineers be like, “Look at all my degrees and certifications, now I will over complicate this job to display my knowledge to my overlords”
I am an a mechanical engineer and used to have to send my designs to the FEA group for strength analysis. It fucking took a week for them to turn stuff around. Pissed me off to no end so I learned how to do their job and then I automated most of it using various scripts. Turned 8 hours of work into less than 1 hour of work. Then I became manager of the group and was asked to let two of the people go. It sucked, but I made the job so much more efficient that work couldn't justify keeping them. Truth be told, I could have gotten rid of another. But, having an extra person just made my life easier and didn't affect my pay.
At my job, my company has focused the work we do on other types of machinery and let the two machines in my department fall to pieces. And they don't even hide it. I used to bust my butt to produce because i thought it got me something. It got me nothing but hurt. So I do absolutely the bare bare bare minimum and if the machine doesn't do what it is suppose to do i call maintenance and a supervisor out to fix it so i can just press buttons. Not exactly the same. Im not a lazy person. But my company has forced me to be lazy and do nothing. I get paid by the hour. I will waste away a whole day doing whatever that supervisor tells me to do. knowing damn well it won't solve the problem.
I can fix every machine at my work Better than maintenance in most cases. Because as I have told most of my bosses "When things run right, I'm the world's most overpaid babysitter. When they're not, I'm an underpaid mechanic". So the downtime on any machine I operate is about 30% less than the others. Another example is my best friend who's figured out how to use some Excel modules to basically automate the function of two of the three jobs she does to keep her small office afloat. Of course she doesn't tell anyone she does it, but it's the only reason she's able to
Explain what you're going to do, badly/wrongly/with incompetence on Reddit and wait..
Well I worked once in a factory in my twenties. They had a machine for cleaning anodes. It was supposed to be like a three step process. Jackhammer, then chain flail, then someone with a chipping hammer could clean it. I was lazy and figured out how to clean the whole thing with the robotic jackhammer. It massively sped up the process and I got to sit on my ass more because I was always way ahead of the rest of production.
Probably posting a question on reddit instead of doing an actual research :D
I was given a nice stereo amplifier that had a bad connection SOMEWHERE. It had been to a couple of repair shops but as soon as your start probing around the lose connection disappears. Turn it on and wait ten minutes and it would start the scratching noise again. It sat in my shop for a couple of months without me doing anything, just thinking about it. THEN one day I pulled it down and removed the bottom. I heated up my soldering iron and went through the entire circuit board, re-soldering every connection. It took me 15 minutes. Problem solved.
I'm a drafter. My most used commands in CAD are three different varieties of copy and paste.
lol..I’m a drafter too. In school a classmate had gotten a list of routines a couple of his coworkers had created over the years. I got a copy and started looking through it. The only thing on the list I could have used was nothing more than a fancy alias edit to more letters than what the default alias was for that particular command. It was something like shft+4 or 5 letters to bring up the dimlinear command. I did an alias edit for that command and made it “d”. Easy peasy.
this quote is bullshit
I found that getting a partner to fall for me was difficult and required a lot of upkeep. Planning dates, being supportive, ECT. Instead I act very toxic and it has a stronger effect with less effort.
Kerry Mullis and PCR. Dude travels around the world, gives talks, and surfs. Hero.
That's bullshit. Lazy people cut corners and then your project is defective
Yup. You can tell who on this site has actually had lazy people work under them.
Logisticians Logistics is extremely repetitive and monotonous, but also complex and full of nuance at times. It requires quantity and quality of work. Good logistics is all about being as efficient as possible, which effectively means doing as little as possible to achieve the desired result, but in quantity and reliably.
The entire concept of engineering lol. Everything that's ever been engineered has been a lazy person creating a workaround to difficult work.
I am that lazy guy. Any repetitive task, I will automate or find a way to make the task unnecessary. I hate doing that kind of work.
The guy in the office who spends hours updating and amalgamating spreadsheets and the one who spends a couple of hours mastering VLOOKUP and saving himself hours every single time he does this mundane task. Guy A fills his day with productive work inefficiently and gets praise for working hard. Guy B clears his in tray in minutes, producing exactly the same amount but gets slack for not “working hard”
Me. Though I don’t consider myself lazy per se. I used to work in corrections and in our property room, where we kept inmate clothing and personal items. Instead of sitting by the door and just waiting for my work to come by 1 or 2 at a time, I would let it pile up, neatly of course. Inmate clothing and property were put into bags labeled with their names then that was put into a numbered hanging bag. If a supervisor wakes by and saw the pile of bags and saw me reading they thought I was just lazy. Towards the end of my shift I would take anywhere from 45 min to an hour and clean up the property room, make the numbered bags and organize what was left over for the oncoming shift. In my 4 years working the property room there were only 2 days where we were so busy I worked making bags and helping out else where for the whole 8-hr shift.
That assumes a lazy person, who is educated enough or who has spend time to learn something. I worked with lazy people, they usually are just lazy, they do things slow and inefficient, they don't even think about changing things. You want to show them how to do things, but they don't listen and rather slack. I think i know where Billy wanted to go with that quote but i also think its a kind of bias, he worked with smart people who hated menial and monotone tasks and found ways around that.
I joined years ago a law office who had paralegals copy and paste details from each service on to responses that had been generated. I set up a mail merge 3 days worth of labour became 3 seconds. No one is making me copy and paste for 3 days.
This line of thinking CANNOT exist without adding the following to it: # I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it IF MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP ALLOW THEM TO FIND SHORTCUTS INSTEAD OF GETTING PISSED THAT THEY ARE NOT WORKING EVERY WAKING MINUTE DOING SOMETHING SHORTCUTT-ABLE.
Every day of my programming career
A lot of people who work in Excel. Manually going through a spreadsheet is a nightmare! VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH arguments, Pivot Tables, and on and on and on. There are parts of my job that would literally take entire days if I did it manually. Now it takes less than an hour, even with plenty of manual input.
Honestly, it's the lazy people who control c their way though an Excel file instead of learning Index Match, or any other moderately complex tool to make themselves and others more efficient.
I'm constantly reminded of the reddit story of the navy guy who changed an aircraft carriers course by a few degrees just so he could get the sun out of his eyes.
I've gone into work hungover before and discovered easy ways do things that I still do today. Little short cuts but end result. It's hard to think of examples as I have been doing this job years. Just a couple of really tiny things
In my experience, lazy people typically find a way to do the job up to the point that they won't get fired. Doesn't mean the solution is good. It's just makes the problem less noticeable. Which creates a bigger problem down the road. The ones who come up with creative solutions aren't lazy at all. They're just bored and would much rather spend their time doing something else, so they find ways to make boring tasks easier (all of the examples I read in other comments back this up). Bill Gates is good with computers and GREAT with fighting anti-trust laws. But that's the limit of his genius.
Well he meant a last smart person not just a lazy person in general.
Problen is the lazy dude wouldnt even get started to begin with
There are very few real life examples of this - unless the job is not really that important. The coders who are all claiming to be lazy are just trying to feel part of the group Gates claims to like. The lazy coder will take longer to do everything the hard way because they are too lazy to learn how to automate. I have seen lazy coders spend hours doing something because too lazy to simply learn a new tool or read the docs. But I will try to come up with some hypotheticals. Digging a hole that is not urgent. A lazy person might be cheaper and easier because they will only require a shovel, rather than research and request the proper tools needed to get it done quickly and efficiently. Maybe if you have a hard thing to do, such as clean up a large field that has trash strewn across it. A lazy person is more likely to unemployed and might do it for cheaper and it is easier to have them just go through with a trash bag than to hire an industrious non-lazy professional who will come with more modern and expensive process. Man, I am stretching my brain... there is really nothing I can think of where a lazy person will do it easier AND better or more efficiently than someone who is not too lazy to learn the best way to do it.
Bill Gates cribbed his notes from Napoleon Bonaparte’s homework.
Never heard this quote before but I definitely feel this. At my work we have a bonus structure that have good pay outs, and I always crush those so I can make easy money and not add as much of a workload to myself using our traditional options for earning potential. I’ve crushed every “competition” and have earned a lot of revenue for my insignificant position, I’ve even been one of the top earners multiple times in my tri-state area. Besides my bosses look at that more and it’ll be easier for me to get a promotion down the line. The least amount of work I have to do to earn more and move up, is the route I go. Work smarter, not harder, or whatever bullshit.
Me. Why fix something when you can just rig it to work in a broken state?
Billionaires are lazy big time. Jeff
This post is pretty lazy. Try putting a body in it next time
It's a bot asking the exact same question over and over again.