It would take a lot of convincing to get me to buy into the notion that "laziness" is ever positive in any situation, other than during a well-deserved vacation.
I agree with SNORGY. I have never seen lazy benefit anyone.
In fact, when doing my doctorate in grad school I had a colleague who was also in grad school. He was (and still is) a very intelligent person. However, I have seen him fall well short in many areas due to laziness. As a result, much of his progress was hindered.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." L. da Vinci
- Gian
I have been at both ends of this spectrum.
Underperform is just inexperience and no one is their to check progress, so the project just runs into the ditch. This is mainly a manager who just thinks that the underperformer should be given a sink or swin experience.
Over acheiving is after above with some years doing it right and trying to better communicate with other disiplines around you. I have been told the saying, i dont have to watch you at all. But this also gets you in trouble because you get in the bad habit of not telling managers if a project is not on target, you just deal with it.
I think performing a quick mental cost/benefit analysis of an activity and deciding not to do it, or do it differently, (Type I Lazy) shouldn't be confused with avoiding work (type II Lazy). Even if it ends up with the same result, in my opinion, there is a fundamental difference in the motivation and reasoning, "this is not efficient/of benefit" vs "I don't feel like doing this". Same result sometimes, but eventually the type II Lazy will show with cut corners and mistakes. (Equally bad is the type 1 with bad judgement I guess).
My grandfather used to use the term 'lazy man's load' to refer to someone carrying the most they possibly can on each trip so that they minimize the number of trips they have to make.
It all depends on what you mean by 'lazy', obviously.
I love it- Type 1 vs Type 2 lazy! What is certain to me is that the elimination of drudgery by means of innovation is a key engineering skill. People who are OK with drudgery don't have the motivation to think about how to eliminate it.
My dad would walk everywhere, at a great clip, and did so until he was in his early '90s. When I asked him why he didn't get a bicycle for the longer trips he made routinely as a young man, he said that riding a bike to him was "walking like hell to give your @ss a ride"...So people may vary greatly in their opinion of what is drudgery and what isn't!
Kind of careens between not remotely matching my experience and just being outright fantasy.
Then again, I'm crabby as hell having just had a project condensed from what was originally meant to be a 6-8 month project into an 8-9 week project plus significant added scope.
Maybe this means I'm the high performer that gets the $hit.
The article seems to have been written by someone that wanted to become a manager more than they wanted to be an engineer. And once becoming a manager, they are sniveling about having to babysit other engineers that are more concerned about becoming managers themselves than they are about being productive engineers.
I've spent over 25 years working as an engineer for aerospace companies. And one thing I've noted during that time is that the best engineers are generally less likely to become managers.
