I have worked with non-lazy engineers too. The amount of convoluted barely working franken stuff they come up with is staggering. No obstacle will stop them from digging the hole deeper.

Nah, they are alright. The real issue is they are so busy working, they never stop to really think about what they are building.

“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.”

-- General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord

This is why teams need both. Relentless, obsessive people are great for the things that need it. Most stuff is usually fine to just do the lazy way though and move on.

Different definitions of lazy.

* lazy - wants do as little work in the future as possible and so spends extra time now solving the problem the right way.

* lazy - has no consideration for the future and takes a straight line path to solving the problem now. Spends all future time fixing problems created from this approach.

There’s a subset of the second definition where you delegate all the future fixing time to some unfortunate young developers, both wasting their time and tainting their souls in the process.

Well said! Have not seen the tension expressed in this way before.

I'm of the first type - which I call "busyness in the pursuit of eventual laziness" :)

something something lies are eventual consistency?

Laziness is a superpower. At least for some people and for some values of laziness.

This has got to be 30 years old or so:

https://thethreevirtues.com

According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.