1y ago

Bill Gates said, "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." What's a real-life example of this?

I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.
On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.
From that day everyone did it my way.

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Literally, every day all day in software development. I break up the code into small parts that can be reused and repurpose those small bits to form larger bits so I have less code to type and maintain.
- IT in general as well. I'm a sysadmin, and half of my job some days is to script/automate simple and annoying tasks to free up a tech to do something more complicated/harder to automate.
  I'm also the sort who has spent hours figuring out how to automate a couple clicks in the UI because I'm sick of doing repetitive bs clicking all the time lol
- I do the same for our support documentation too. Is a question asked 3x in a month? Straight to the FAQ you go.
  Some questions have been asked for Years. I've never understood why some people spend 100x the amount of time on a question than they ever needed to.
- I don't mean to start promoting some software but this is why I use Alfred on Mac. The entire software is about removing all the fake tasks that we do during a day. I set up my entire day and experience to be just a couple of keystrokes away.

I had a manager at work who did not handle tech well. He had a period of unavailability every Friday as he had to do a weekly report.
I walked in on him doing that report, which took been two and four hours, because he be was manually copying hundreds of numbers from a csv file to a report document. By hand!
He was writing down each number in a notepad, using a pen, then switched to the reporting doc and wrote it back, one line at a time.
It took me less than 5 minutes to write an excel macro that did his weekly report automatically, with extra bells and whistles to boot.
This was the absolute worst example of work hard not smart I've ever seen.
- Had a similar experience. Previous dude took days to come up with a report. I spent a week or two on it, and any monkey can copy paste values and generate the same report in under a hour.
- He didn't even print it, take a photo, and then scan it back in? What an absolute nerd.
  
  At a different job, I had someone print an email, put it in an envelope and post it to an external faxing service...
- Oh god. This just reminded me of an old boss. He was a general contractor (very large, and very expensive custom homes ground up builds), and I still don’t know how he was still in business, and more importantly, hadn’t been sued into oblivions. Anyhow, he would use and excel spreadsheet to do his estimates. Ok, not ideal, but could work.
  At some point I realized what he was doing, and asked why he wasn’t using any formulas or macros to make it all automatic (he was doing the math with a calculator then entering the info). He didn’t know it was possible. He would manually write down, then transfer info from one sheet to another and of course there were tons of errors. I spent a little time making him a whole new one (his idea not mine) with all the bells and whistles. He never fucking used it.
- In a 200 person company, I made friends with some peeps in the marketing department.
  Yep, their workflows have tons of automation potential. They are definitely doing hours of work that can be done in minutes. Companies really should have rotations where a dev just sits and watches sales and marketing do any data input work.
  
  I have to enter data into payroll for when a teacher covers a class for an absent teacher. Usually, there are 5 teachers who I pay for one hour each. Each teacher has an ID number.
  To pay one teacher I have to enter their ID number. Select their job code from a drop down list, tell the database I am adding to it by choosing or entering A in a box. Then I have to pull the date from a drop down list. Then I enter the digit 1 (to pay 1 hour). Then I enter the ID number of the absent teacher. Then I enter the sub request number created by the absent teacher. Then I click "change."
  I have to do this for all 5 teachers that covered the class. One-at-an-effing-time.
  If I had a "dev" handy, I would say, let me enter the ID, date, and job number for the absent teacher. Let me list the 5 substituting teacher id numbers, and the 1 hour should be the default.
  Of course there will never be a 'dev' around because my county purchased the payroll software and no one who is anywhere near using it gets to make the purchasing decisions.

Literally anything innovative.
Laziness is the root of all invention.
We didn't invent the wheel because it allowed us to work more- we invented it because it was easier than carrying the same load before.
Computers? we invented the abacus because counting that much on hands is difficult. Easier to use an abacus. and computers were just one more step along that journey. Sure... it enables very much more complex math...
... computer modeling/simulation? invented because it's less work than building physical models and testing that way. (especially if you consider expenses as being a measure of other kinds of work- like fund raising.)
there's very few things that were innovative, that weren't ultimately developed because somebody had an idea for easing workloads.
- You can call it laziness sure. But it’s closer to thermodynamics. A system is finding its lowest free energy configuration.
  It’s not laziness to think of new things - like doing a simulation instead of a physical model takes a ton of work up front. It’s only worth it IF it works as a better solution, and it may not. This type of “activation energy” then leading to lower energy configurations is common in nature.
  Laziness in this case would be to just keep building physical models because that is easier than thinking of the maths, validation, etc of working on a simulation.
  I guess I just disagree with Bill entirely on this one.

I remember reading a story about this years ago… probably urban legend, and my details will be off, but it goes like this:
A toothpaste factory had a QA issue where some boxes would leaves without a toothpaste tube inside. To rectify this, they hired a consulting company to the tune of millions of dollars who designed and built an elaborate scale under the conveyor belt that would sound an alarm when an empty box went past. An employee would be stationed there to react to the alarm, find and remove the empty box.
This worked swimmingly, until one day the owner realized he hadn’t heard the alarm going off in quite some time, so he went to investigate the problem. He found that the employee who was stationed there was annoyed by the alarm, and had set up a floor fan blowing across the conveyor belt prior to the scale - blowing off the empty boxes before they were weighed and triggering the alarm. His solution had cost $10.
- I love stories like this. It feels almost like a modern parable.

In my experience almost every job can get easier by taking a second to streamline tasks and/or stack functions.
Also in my experience, many people do things in a less than ideal manner because if they finish early and sit around for the rest of their shift, their manager will yell at them. I don't really know how to solve that problem.
- As a manager it can be incentivized by not doing that…
  Let them do it the effecient way and chill out at the end of the shift. Then, slowly ramp up the work your asking for until they have some time to fuck off still but productivity is up over all.
  Everyone is happy that way
  
  The only problem with your plan is that it requires thoughtful, intelligent managers who are capable of looking at the big picture. Managers like that are in short supply.
  For too many managers, any free time is only seen as lost productivity… and if productivity isn’t possible, there’s always busywork. “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean”.
- Also in my experience, many people do things in a less than ideal manner because if they finish early and sit around for the rest of their shift, their manager will yell at them.
  The secret is to manage based on work output/completed vs ass in seat/constant productivity. If you only care about work output and quality, who cares if your employee is twiddling their thumbs if the job is done? An employee having idle time can be good to help them from feeling overworked.

shouldnt we start with, did Gates ever really do it ?

I've heard variations of this going back 30 years in the automotive repair business. I often paraphrase a version of it when cutting some corners or doing things in a weird way that saves time and energy, but maybe isn't the safest. Probably not the original intent but...

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