> Is that laziness?
> Edit: that said, I wasn’t motivated to get around the paywall, so I have no idea if the article discusses similar concepts making my reply potentially redundant.
Laziness is the quality of not being willing to work or use any effort [1]
Lazy: averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent. [2]
According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris [3]
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/lazin...
I mean, if taking a pill can make someone less lazy then laziness must be a thing, right?
If you want to avoid lazy employees, and hire motivated self-starters, then "lazy" might work as a description. If a good employee is suddenly having problems and you would prefer to keep them, all "lazy" does is put a non-explanation insult on them, it doesn't tell you anything. "They lost a family member and haven't been sleeping properly and are exhausted" tells you something. "They just saw another team's project get cancelled on a whim" tells you something else. "They feel micromanaged and are frustrated" tells you something else.
That’s a description but for all the explanatory power it has, it may as well say “laziness is when you don’t have God with you”.
“I’m not going to pay you tomorrow”
“Then I’m unwillingly to work”
“Being unwilling to work is laziness”.
Or
“Why can’t you get moving on that project?”
“I don’t know”
“Then you must be Godless. Next!”
Calling someone lazy is a lazy dismissive non-explanation.
In your case, it has a different meaning than Godlessness from the point of view of a boss, since a lazy person is one who'll only complete a task if you motivate them extrinsically.
I think it's unnecessarily insulting, though being an insult might be part of the motivational power.
Runner vs Coach - in school if you're being forced to run and hate it, the coach shouting at you and the threat of punishment keeps you going (is that the same as it removing your laziness? Is hating running really being lazy?). But in the case of an enthusiast competitively running, they might benefit from the coach holding them to a higher standard, but are they really someone who isn't willing to run without external motivation?
You might imagine a couch potato on welfare as a lazy person. Even then they will likely get up to get their welfare money, get food, use the toilet, go to sleep. When they have reasons they care about to do things, they do. If they literally don't get up to use the toilet or eat, we generally call them depressed or mentally ill rather than lazy. So why does the ordinary 'lazy' person watch TV instead of doing something else? Does calling them 'lazy' add any value as a label, or does it obscure whatever is really going on? Is it a Pavlov-dog conditioned situation, where they were disapproved of as a child whenever they did anything, a kind of learned helplessness, a once bitten twice shy situation? Is it that they lack imagination of what other things could be interesting or enjoyable? Is it that they never did anything long enough to get success at it so they have no internal model of that being possible and what it feels like? Is it that they have physical problems or pains, or mental shame and self-hate that make doing things more unpleasant than is visible from the outside?
This implies that your definition of laziness or Godlessness doesn't describe a consistent personality trait. The exact same personality seems to be more affected by the nature of the "work" than the presence of external motivation.
Of course that dichotomy is applied frequently in programming. It could easily be described as “redefining the problem”.
But in my early programming experience it was trading time dedicated to education and hacking in exchange for avoiding manual effort. I learned to programmatically access MP3 metadata so I could update my blog when I posted new songs I recorded, rather than typing out the information directly. That’s literally why I became a programmer, because I got tired of typing some stuff twice (as I had already typed it in iTunes when converting to MP3).
That certainly feels more like what I colloquially understand laziness to mean, than the cleverer reinterpretation used by Wall to describe what I understand as work substitution in programming as a non-novice.
Fixing problems through programming is all about thinking, not typing. If you try to fix something merely by typing, you’re avoiding the main work we’re supposed to do. Otherwise, why even have computers?
