Laziness is not working hard.
What you're talking about is something else.
Sloppy or Careless work maybe?
But not lazy. If you're working 40+ hours a week you're definitely not lazy.
You can absolutely put in a lot of hours, but be putting in near-zero effort. This results in sloppy or careless work, but the root cause is the laziness of the person.
You've just provides your personal assertion on a non-definition. Do you actually have an alternative definition that does not imply working lots of hours?
That said, I think "laziness" is only a small part of the answer. It seems to me that it's usually about an emotional response. Kind of like procrastination. The hard questions hit hard. There's a real good-feeling self-satisfaction from putting in hours of sweat.
The point is that hard work doesn't imply excessive hours. If it did, that would mean anyone who doesn't put in excessive hours is lazy, which isn't true.
> I routinely come across developers who are the real deal: they’re conscientious and judicious in an unwavering way. They set a standard for themselves and do not compromise on it. Whether that’s a deliberate thing or whether they’re just built that way, it’s humbling to witness. If there’s a flaky test, they investigate it and fix it. If there’s a bug they spot in the wild, they make a ticket, and maybe even fix it then-and-there. If a new feature doesn’t gel well with the existing code, they refactor the code first rather than hacking the feature in. They’ll dive as far down the stack as necessary to get to the bottom of something. None of these things are necessary but great developers know that if they don’t address a problem early, and properly, it will only cost them more time in the long run. [... and more.]
This sounds like a great definition of not-lazy, and it does not mention long hours anywhere. My anecdotal experience is that I usually only have 20-35 not-lazy hours to give per week; any further hours per week are much less potent. Right now I'm working 24 hours per week and I think my employer is getting a great bargain: they don't have to pay me for hours that would likely be lazy.
If someone is producing a high volume of low effort work, they are not lazy. What they are is not disciplined, or not skilled.
If someone is producing low volumes of high effort work, they are similarly not lazy, they are highly skilled and maybe a perfectionist
If someone is producing high volumes of high effort work they are a either a one of a kind savant or they are lying about the volume or effort.
If someone is producing low volumes of low effort work, then maybe we can call them lazy.
I think a lot of times we are put in boxes, and our roles are pretty heavily constrained, such that we do not have the power to "answer the real questions." Raise your hand anyone who's had this conversation with their manager:
Manager: "Dev, I'd like you to take more responsibility, be transformational, be a 'force multiplier' for the team!"
Dev: "OK, let me make major architectural decisions without having to get approval from three levels of managers."
Manager: "Uh, wait..."
Dev: "Let me hire and fire, and build up a team of direct reports."
Manager: "Hold up..."
Dev: "Give me a budget to spend on tools, training, contractors, and so on."
Manager: "Whoa, whoa, whoa.. I didn't mean that transformational..."
Someone skilled produces low volumes of medium-to-high effort work because they are the sort of person who would rather browse social media, or engage in office gossip, or play "call a meeting to discuss" games to avoid having to do the boring work.
If someone is "undisciplined," more often they are just lazy and are engaging in avoidance behaviors. Humans with serious executive function issues are a tiny (super tiny) minority of the workforce.
There are a million reasons/excuses for people to be lazy depending on perspective.
Personally, I view people with this trait to be productivity vampires that I avoid like the plague regardless of their reasons (which in my experience are 99% excuses and 1% genuine hardships).
A person struggling with narcolepsy doesn't fall into the same bucket as the person who just wastes time at work so they don't have to do work.
Irrelevant, and reads as a non-sequitur. OP expressed his personal assertion on laziness, not productivity.
Your definition of "not-lazy" by it's very nature relies on systematically working overtime.
Investigating and fixing flaky tests is either explicitly covered by a ticket, and thus a part of run-of-the-mill tasks, or something a developer does in unscheduled tasks by going above-and-beyond including in work hours.
Finding a bug, creating a ticket, and working on it is not proof of non-laziness as that's a part of the basic job description.
Refactoring a feature is either tracked by a ticket and covered in normal ticket-assignment processes, thus not a demonstration of lack of laziness, or it's something you do in your own time.
You have to clarify where you find the time to do all that "above-and-beyond" stuff because it's either normal work done on normal company time, which surely doing the normal/bare minimum is not proof of not being lazy, or it's going the extra mile, which is certainly not done during normal office hours.
I think you didn't understood the problem. No one is talking about penalizing people for only doing 40hours. The problem is that code quality is never prioritized or allocated time, so you either live with it or you go above and beyond and you deal it yourself on your own time. If your team is bounded to KPIs which you don't build up by refactoring bad code or diving deep into code issues or tracking weird elusive bugs, either you are forced to pull extra hours to no fall behind your team or your performance will clearly be awful.
This is not an inevitability, though. It depends on the temperament of the company you work for. A slight majority of the companies I've worked for didn't mind allocating time for that sort of thing at all (but they did expect you to make a business case for it).
> You have to clarify where you find the time to do all that "above-and-beyond" stuff because it's either normal work done on normal company time, which surely doing the normal/bare minimum is not proof of not being lazy, or it's going the extra mile, which is certainly not done during normal office hours.
At every company I've worked for, I've had time for "above-and-beyond" stuff during normal office hours. That's just how low expectations are in my neck of the woods. Or maybe I'm outrageously talented and I would still excel working on some elite FAANG team... but I doubt it.
I think it's a notion worth considering in such a conversation.
So based on the table they are skilled, right? Are you suggesting that they are a savant in disguise and that they can produce high volumes of high effort work if they weren't "lazy"?
if the work is considered medium-to-high effort by the organization, your opinion on if it's avoiding "boring" work (which can still be low or high effort) is irrelevant.
>If someone is "undisciplined," more often they are just lazy and are engaging in avoidance behaviors.
IME it's because the employers don't trust nor want them to work on the high effort work. So either the business's most profitable software is the most boring, or the candidate is too junior (alternatively, the position and responsibility is simply filled or not valued)
>Humans with serious executive function issues are a tiny (super tiny) minority of the workforce.
Likewise, humans who can do "productive" creative work for 80 hours a week consistently, for years, is also a super tiny minority.
At the end of the day, "lazy" is relative and we haven't even established a baseline for what is/isn't lazy. So this conversation won't go anywhere. All we established in your lens is that taking breaks or doing non-technical work (meetings, even gossip depending on the line of work) is not productive in your eyes.
> Working on X but Y is a blocker
> Okay, I can do some work with Y to help get unblocked
> No we'll let A (on a different team, maybe a different contracted studio) deal with it, here's tiny widget Z to work on in the meantime
Sometimes it means well, sometimes it feels like they don't value your expertise nor care about fostering growth. And sometimes it's just politics (especially when working with multiple different companies and contractors and all that).
I have literally had (TWO SEPARATE!) people tell me, thinking it was perfectly acceptable, that they often put extra lines in their code so they can go back and clean it up instantly with auto-format while pretending they did real work.
What would you call someone who defaults to this type of behavior if not lazy? Work shy?