People say that it’s good for a sysadmin to be lazy. Fair enough, a lazy sysadmin has more incentive to automate things. The same can be said about programmers, or IT workers in general. After a while everyone starts to go around saying that ey is proud to be a lazy person. Employers start to look at laziness as a desirable trait.
However, let’s not forget that being a lazy in the normal sense is not always a good thing. I differentiate between three types of laziness:
- One that encourage people to either automate the task, or to find and solve the root of the problem, so that the task is no longer necessary
- One that discourage people from doing something, because the reward is not worth the trouble
- One that lead people to get others to do the particular task
(1) is obviously a good thing. I think (2) is also a good thing: you shouldn’t have to do what you don’t have to do, if it’s not bringing you satisfaction. Maybe someone will say that (2) is neutral, that’s not wrong either.
But (3) is just selfishness. People want the result, but don’t want to spend the effort, so they try to push the effort to others. I hate those people.
Or maybe I’m just making this up and there is only one kind of laziness and the three are just different ways people react.