The Right Kind of Lazy

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

― Bill Gates

I was contemplating this quote and felt it was missing something. A lazy person might indeed find an easy way to do a hard job. Automate a tedious task, identify simplifications that allow faster progress, and so forth.

A lazy person might also just do a poor, rushed job and leave us with a large mess to clean up: Writing code that's quick and dirty, rigging up an AI agent with no evaluation methods and guardrails in place. Those sorts of things.

Present Lazy vs Future Lazy

To tap into the engineering brilliance unlocked by the lazy person Bill Gates talks about, we need to be lazy about total effort over time, not just in the present moment:

• Too lazy to write unit tests right now vs. too lazy to extensively debug and revisit things that inexplicably break

• Too lazy to document code today vs. too lazy to repeatedly explain the system to every new team member

• Too lazy to implement security best practices upfront vs. too lazy to recover from data breaches and rebuild customer trust

Through experience, we gain a sixth sense for these trade-offs. And then our inherent laziness becomes a powerful ally in reinforcing good habits.