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Clients want to keep costs low, and if they can, they will pass costs onto outside companies. That’s why we decided to “get lazy” and only do what we are paid to do. We won’t go out of our way to improve a project, refactor, or fix code unless we are getting paid for it.

And when we find ourselves with a task in front of us and we don’t understand how to solve it, we usually don’t blame ourselves. This is especially true if the problem has something to do with legacy code. See, here’s the thing: we weren’t paid to understand the legacy code. We were paid to add a feature, solve a bug, or whatever.

Suddenly becoming experts in a project’s legacy code would be outside the scope of our work, and since we’re lazy, we’re not going to venture outside of our assignment unless we’re paid to do so. A project shouldn’t expect you to be intelligent or tech-savvy, as far as the legacy code is concerned. Instead, you need to focus on closing tickets.

It’s not your fault if the code is a
complete mess, or the bug is serious,
or you can’t estimate how much time it
will take to understand the legacy code,
let alone how to fix the bug. So whose
fault is it? The first guilty party is the
code itself. And the clients overseeing
the code are also at fault.

Once you accept that, you can put together a basic report by creating new tickets. This report could be lazy-simple:

˲ There is no documentation for Class Y, can’t figure out how it works.

˲ Library Z is in use but why aren’t you using library B?

˲ This algorithm is a complex mess, can you explain what it does?

˲ The class naming rules are incoherent, can you provide documentation?

Suddenly, your initial “report” is instead a list of questions. You can’t provide the answers because you don’t honestly know them and you are too lazy to figure it out. Answering these questions falls outside of the scope of work you were hired for, so it is reasonable to expect the client to provide documentation.

Now, you might have noticed a com-
mon thread in the questions here. I
didn’t ask for help. I didn’t ask some-
one to create something for me. Pro-
grammers will often reach out for help,
saying something like “which library
should I use for this task?”
Here’s the thing: your clients aren’t
hiring you so they can do your work for

Yegor Bugayenko Lazy Developers Are the Best Developers http://bit.ly/2lEC9KE July 15, 2019

We are taught from a young age that the hardest workers enjoy the most success. Hard work pays off, or so we are told. But “hard work” can be a bit problematic for software developers, because it often means going well above and beyond the original scope of the project.

This is especially true when it comes to understanding legacy code. When you deal with legacy code, you often find yourself having to engage in so-called “deep thinking.” You are expected to understand large problem scopes before you even begin trying to fix the small bugs. For a long time, this stressed me out. Then I got an idea: be lazy.

At my company, Zerocracy, we practice a #NoAltruism policy. We, quite literally, think only about ourselves and our personal profit. This might sound a bit harsh. Isn’t it better to play nice and try to appease your clients? In an ideal world, maybe. But here’s what we have learned about clients: they also practice #NoAltruism.

The Benefits
of Indolence
Yegor Bugayenko explains his realization that
software developers should go neither above nor beyond.

DOI:10.1145/3360907 http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm