the muscle of thought
November 26th, 2004 by boon
I spent the entire day was spent looking at walls and my computer screen. The only time I used the keyboard was to write emails or send IM messages or search queries @ google. My code hardly moved, though the Eclipse IDE was running since the morning. If performance was measured based on how much source code was accomplised each working day, I would be at the bottom of the rank.
To be honest, I don’t like the developer/coder label on me. But technically, this is what I am paid to do… to churn out applications. And the faster I get it done, the better, I suppose. Some coders actually enjoy the fact that they can earn money writing code which is easy for them, but seems impossible to others. But to compare one coder to another is a messy feat. So, that is why I don’t like being labelled as such. It seems a little mindless just to be paid to write code, in my opinion.
Maybe some people equivalate ‘hard work’ to gruelling hours at crunch time, tolerating attacks from both internal and external parties, but somehow end up with a finished product in enduring composure.
And some people may say otherwise, but I have rarely ever worked hard in all my life. Mostly, I try to stay away from ‘hard work’ if I can. This is despite the fact that I do spend late nights in the office, am eager to fix bugs and spend a lot of time doing documentation and supporting my apps. So, to me… all this isn’t hard. It’s just part of what I do.
What IS hard for me to do is to work with people who have second class objectives and can live with messy code and hidden bugs. (Ok… so I do make quick hacks in my code, but I don’t plan to sustain that practice.)
I prefer that companies hire people who are intelligent perfectionists that are lazy. That way, they can get a system up and running beautifully in no time, so that they can go home and watch Empire Strikes Back for the nth time. It’s a lot better than dealing with hardworking people who strive so hard to make ends meet, but end up in mediocre performance. Of course, attitude makes all the difference. A lot of humble people are hardworkers, and a lot of proud people are smart and lazy. So, it really influences the company culture a lot.
So, before I drive into a tangent here with my post…. it pays to think through a product. I’ve heard one speaker say that he devotes his wednesdays to think and nothing else. For me, I do that on a case-to-case basis. At the moment I’m trying to overhaul my web framework for the product I deployed in Thailand, which is also planning to launch in the near future as one of Maxis‘ value added services. In common terms, it’s like trying to take out the engine of an old Porche, and refit it with a completely different beast. The outside remains the same, but it runs and feels differently,…. well, at least from perspective of the engineer.
The reason I am doing this is so that I can write less code, fix less bugs, and keep things down to manageable modules… but keep the whole thing running pretty much the same way it’s running now in Thailand (or better). I like the fact that I won’t have to take a day to fix a bug… or even a day to find where the bug is. Hence I don’t like working on other people’s code.
Yup, I am lazy… but I’d like to keep other people thinking I’m still a nice guy and am willing to do the work for them. Hopefully they don’t know I’m switching engines underneath their noses. 