When I'm not 100% sure I'm paddling the right way or management wants me to paddle the wrong way, I don't really peddle, I complain and start playing around with fun tech that I think is the right way. Then when the time comes, I makes some powerful strokes again (aided by the new knowledge from playing).
This is going to sound cocky but I feel that I'm pretty good at determining what the right way is, and that is the reason I get away with it. It's like I'm slowly walking by a wall, feeling where it is weakest for months on end, then I make one big push, it falls, things change, I make noise, people appreciate it and understand this is the right way. Lead by example it's been called.
To be clear, I consider the wrong way usually the ineffective way. Ie in our org many people write many one-off scripts, I always try to focus on creating re-useable assets following global standards. I promote innersource because it's fun but also because it enabled other devs to make my CI/CD pipelines. I'm lazy but I think in a good way.
Welcome to management. ;)
Much more dangerous than someone who is merely slow.
<i>Felt like I needed to resolve that or we may never stop being sarcastic</i>
It's putting people in a box which people love to do.
The industrial idiot will cause more work, build in you into a corner, waste time, resources, people, lives, on counter productive missions and projects which distract from essential work, cause bottlenecks in any or all systems at once.
Objectively bad processes run away with more power than deserved.
An army of autonomous actors only works if you root out the problems and agents causing drift.
My current project is terrible, the people who set it up tried but have that real lack of understanding what is required (they have clean code but no tests) it is really hard to debug and takes forever to deliver anything. If they had just done nothing I could have set it up properly when I started and we could have been done months ago.
Or is it just impossible to be both clever and stupid at the same time? I've had my share of both cleverly stupid ideas and stupidly clever ideas.
So four combinations.
1. clever and stupid
2. industrious and lazy
Neither of those options make much sense. They are choosing both values of one parameter and no values are choosen for the other parameter
What are those areas? Imho: Vision, providing direction, knowing when to be productive at the exact right time, identify well in advance what won't work, identify who is doing the same as you and working together or leveraging that work. Perhaps you can do very little until you finally identify that one core important thing and be praised for those couple of hours. It's a skill as any other.
This has been my philosophy, as long as a developer is not making me do more work, I won't mind.
Lazy developers don't really bother me, if you do a couple hours of high-quality work a week I'd have no complaint. (Many weeks I do as little, some weeks I do a decent amount of real work :) The problem is developers making negative progress, usually messes that need to be cleaned up ... and it's an awkward situation, no matter your relative authority. I'm in the "we should consider them lines spent, not lines produced" camp.
An old disputed quote:
> I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.