Clayton Lengel‑Zigich: Welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly Podcast. I’m Clayton Lengel‑Zigich.

Jade Meskill: I’m Jade Meskill.

Derek Neighbors: I’m Derek Neighbors.

Roy VandeWater: I’m Roy van de Water.

The Love of Lazy

Clayton: Today we are talking about my favorite thing, being lazy.

Jade: Oh my gosh, that’s my favorite thing too.

Clayton: Really?

Jade: Yeah.

Roy: Do we really have to talk about it?

Jade: I don’t know.

Clayton: [laughs] I don’t want to think about it. That’s too much.

Jade: [laughs] Good thing we can talk without thinking.

[laughter]

The Obsession with Rewarding Effort and Hard Work

Clayton: So many more jokes to be made.

This topic, Jade and I talked about this at lunch. It sounds like, Jade and Roy, you’ve been talking about this a lot. The concept stems from a lot of the clients that we’re working with.

We see these teams where they do a whole bunch of work, work, work, work, work, work, and they get praised for all their effort. At the end of the sprint they didn’t really deliver anything of any value, they didn’t really ship anything, the customer’s not delighted. But boy oh boy, they worked hard, and everyone in the room is clapping for them.

That feels really disingenuous. I think I heard someone the other day talk about how they stayed up till 5:30 AM tweaking these servers. I thought to myself, “Man, if I had to do that, I would be very upset. I would probably find some way to automate it.”

Roy: I’d shoot myself in the face.

Clayton: Yeah, that was my next way of saying that.

The Hero Culture

Jade: I remember living in that world, though. I was definitely part of the “Hero” culture. I could always be counted on to work the extra hours, or do whatever it took to get the job done. I’ve wizened up since then.

Clayton: I think it’s interesting because I think we have an “Automate everything” mentality, but there’s so much stuff now that…I used to do that, maybe be the hero, or you want to work the extra hours or whatever. It felt good to do that, like you were contributing a lot, but now it just feels dumb. I’d feel stupid if I do that.

Jade: I do too. Roy and I were talking about it the other day. I said, “If you find yourself working that hard to get something done, you’re probably working wrong.” It is so easy to get away with automating a lot of things, not having to do that much work. The problem is, there’s definitely a stigma against being perceived as not working hard.

Separating Value from Effort

Derek: I think my goal in life lately, maybe it’s why I’m a little more interested in robotics lately, is to replace myself with some form of automation. That is the pinnacle. I think what happens is, people do think that, “If I’m not doing something all the time, people are going to think I’m not valuable.”

I keep saying, what is it that makes us think this way? I can’t remember if it was Carlos Segura , or a designer of some kind. He’d said something very profound to me, at one point during a talk.

They basically said, “I make three million dollars for giving somebody a logo, and that logo only takes me about an hour or two worth of effort, to actually make the logo. My value is in knowing what to make for a logo, and that’s why I’m worth three million dollars.” The guy who makes the Nike Swoosh, we can all laugh at, “Man, that’s so simplistic!” Think of how valuable that is, or the Coca Cola logo, or whatever.

We focus on things that are very low value, and we think that we just have to put in a ton of effort to get any kind of result. I like to say that you have to put in a ton of effort to become an expert, and to become good, to know what the right logo is to do. But that’s not the same thing as, then every logo thereafter, you have to put in tons of effort to get there.

I think that’s the misnomer, is people just want to work hard, they don’t want to work at getting good. If you work at getting good, then you don’t have to work as hard anymore.

No Tolerance For Wasting My Time

Clayton: Jade, you’d talked the other day about…Your definition of “Lazy,” I think, was about not wasting your time. It had something to do with wasting your time.

Jade: It’s that I have no tolerance for wasting my time.

Clayton: I think there’s a big difference. I’m not opposed to hard work by any means. I think hard work is a great thing, and maybe being deliberate with what you’re doing is very important, and busting your ass to get to do that stuff, but I don’t want to waste my time.

Jade: I don’t want to work hard at being stupid.

It’s Not Fair, That It Takes So Little Work But Costs So Much

Roy: There’s still the “Human nature” component of not valuing it. Clayton and I were talking about his eye surgery, because he just got LASIK surgery. He spent a ton of money, and I think the operation, you said it took five minutes?

Clayton: Yeah, basically.

Roy: It was all automated, the doctor came in, pushed a button, and you’re done?

Clayton: Right.

Roy: I could totally see myself thinking, “I paid however much money for this? That’s crazy! I should have paid $5 because it took him 5 minutes!” It’s not like I’d rather have surgery for an hour.

Jade: You want the surgeon to work really hard on you, for a couple of hours?

Roy: Take a really long time, right.

[laughter]

Derek: I think it’s the value. If you’re spending $100 or $200 a year on contacts and you go out and you have this surgery, and it makes it so you don’t have to have contacts for 10 years or more, the value of that’s pretty high.

Jade: Maybe you just hate wearing them, it’s not even a cost thing.

Roy: But the weird thing is that I would actually feel less slighted if it took an hour, than if it took five minutes.

Praising Effort as the Default

Clayton: I don’t know what it is about software teams that it’s so easy to fall in that trap of just praising effort. I think some of it has to do with, nobody in the whole food chain is very clear about outcomes. If the entire maybe organization or department doesn’t have some alignment about what it means to be successful, I think you just default to back‑patting.

Jade: It’s the thing that’s very easily visible. If I can look out in the parking lot and I see everybody’s cars here, and it’s 6:30 , I know everybody’s working hard. Man, they must be a great team. [laughs]

Roy: But there’s a waste factor to it, too. I may have one guy who’s able to do in an hour what the other team takes 10 hours to do. He comes in and works for an hour and leaves. That gets me thinking, “What if I got him working all 10 hours? I’d have 10 times the capacity,” although maybe the magic to why he’s able to do 10 times what everybody else does is because he only works an hour. There’s a lot of that to it.

Optimizing for Automation and Future Laziness

Derek: I think some of it, too, is it’s like preventative care in healthcare, or in medicine, or dentistry. I think a lot of times people don’t see the value in automation upfront, because there is performance degradation upfront that pays off in the long term.

If I go in and spend 10 minutes, I don’t know, once a quarter or twice a year getting my teeth cleaned, and I spend two minutes every night brushing my teeth, I can prevent really costly damage, and all sorts of repeated visits to the dentist down the road. But if it’s like, “Man, I just don’t have two minutes to brush my teeth every night to maintain that,” that’s ridiculous.

Jade: We have this happening at our client right now, where they have a build process that takes one to two weeks to run an automated test suite that they have. They have the capability to increase it by at least 100 times performance.

Roy: They know it’ll take less than a few weeks.

jade: Nobody will give them the time to invest to speed up their process that much. They think they can even take it to 1,000 or 10,000 times speed, but nobody will give them the time to invest. Now they just waste everybody’s time for weeks and weeks on end, because they refuse to invest that little bit.

Derek: I think that that’s a great point. I think that really solid engineers don’t ask because what they do is they say, “Look. We ship stuff late all the time. That’s standard for the industry, nobody’s going to beat us too hard.

“If we have to take in the shorts for a sprint or two or for a week, or a month, or whatever to get t