The Lazy Developer Paradox

Developers are Lazy. Yes. I said it, and for this reason alone, it is absolutely true. It may be insulting, or prejudiced, but there is no doubt about it. Developers just hate working.

I am referring of course to software developers. Not Real-Estate or Photograph developers. They might be lazy too, only I wouldn’t know anything about that. All I know is what I know (duh…). And I am a code developer for some time now.

A real developer will understand immediately what I mean. And she will not be surprised if I added that this same developer will code for days without food or sleep when the challenge is in front of her. And the root for this behavior, is one. No matter how you spin it, the main drive, or spark, or dark urge in the developer heart is that he simply DOES NOT WANT TO DO THE WORK!

Now, if there is still a reader out there that does not agree (and I’m sure there is, because people are inherently evil), I’ll lay out the example that supports my claim.

I used to work in a code factory (a.k.a. software-company) that made this one software product, and sold it all over the world. In those days, software used to come in expensive cardboard boxes, filled with many plastic diskettes numbered “one” to “lots”, and a 20 lb user manual. All of these had to be introduced in the language of the country it was sold in. No Frenchman would have paid good Francs to have his computer insulted by an English speaking User-Manual.

I worked in the “translation” department. Not that I know any language other than my mother-tongue (hell, I’m not even sure I have my mother’s tongue). What I had to do is take out the English content out of the user manual, and the Software’s menu and the Diagram captions, wrap it all in a neat little translatable package, send it to the translation-factory (or whatever these poor university graduate slaves were called), receive it back when they finished, and push it back into the Manual/Menu/Caption relevant areas.

I was bored out of my mind. It was repetitive, mind numbing, HARD work. When I could not stand it anymore, I wrote a small VB tool that just did it all for me. It opened the Adobe file editor, copied the text, converted it, merged it with the software menu, and repeat and rains. It was a silly piece of code, but it worked. It did the job a bit faster, and it allowed me not to do it.

Yes.

I was completely off the hook.

No more hard work.

All that was left to do is press a button….

And learn Visual Basic.

And Adobe-Publisher DDL.

And Trans-Script file format.

And Windows-Resource-File format.

And Debug, and Improve, and Fix-Bugs and Redesign and Refactor and on, and on, and on.

Forever….

So here is the Lazy Developer Paradox:

Developers (well, to be honest, at least some of them) write code to do their work for them. Especially when it is a simple task, with little-to-no mental challenge, and too much repetitive actions. And all these developers come across the same inescapable conclusion: Writing code that replaces you, is VERY VERY HARD WORK.

And then they write code that write the code for you.

And this is how the next generation of programming language is born.