> This all presupposes the employees aren't inherently lazy. But, that's been my experience - "lazy" developers aren't generally lazy, just bored.
In fact, afaik, it's kinda 'proven' loosely in psychology studies that "laziness" isn't a bad trait per se. In fact, from our ancestral laziness comes our drive to build things (systems, organizations, machines, civilization!) to do our job for us, anywhere from 'streamlining' to 'automating'.
Many great developers are self-reportedly very ambivalent between laziness and the drive to make things — alchemy notably happens when what you make today will let you be lazier tomorrow (you probably need to be at least 25 to 'feel' it though).
Of course, being a nerdy creature, you'll rinse and repeat indefinitely — there probably never will be a shortage of things to automate in your lifetime — but that's the spirit. As you said, we gotta keep ourselves busy to balance the lazy. ;-)
I hadn't thought of the evolutionary benefits before but this makes a lot of sense. Related to this, I have noticed that I really like efficiency for sake of efficiency, which is probably a trait many other tech people share.
As a silly example, I was hiking at night recently and my headlamp had gotten a little dull because the batteries were starting to get low. Even though I had a spare set, I didn't swap them out because the old ones still had hours of power left, albeit at reduced output. The cost of a few batteries is trivial, but the thought of throwing them away while still useful bugged me more than the reduced light output. My partner thought I was crazy for this, and I don't disagree, but for whatever reason little efficiencies matter a lot to me.
Oh dear rurp, you don't want to get me started on that! ;-)
Your hiking example is a textbook page of my life, I do things like that all the time. Partner openly jokes that I'm crazy / weird / funny — all in good spirits, I concur that it's not exactly statistically average (i.e. 'normal') behavior. — "but why do you do this like that?", eyes usually roll before I even finish my elevator pitch; but every once in a while I catch her imitating. Good times, haha. Small victories, you know.
That being said,
I have a gazillion justifications for this. From ancient Zen and Stoicism (you guessed it) to modern scientific organization of work / tasks / labor, passing by cognitive science and physics and what-have-you.
It's. Just. More. Efficient. To. Be. Efficient!..
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But it's also a delusion, to some degree (when you mistake the means for the ends I suppose, when it becomes a zero-sum rat race from a 3rd person perspective). Hence a healthy distance with the concept, I treat it as one parameter/rule of our universe — nature favors the efficient ones — but I've learned to just shrug at the general inefficiency of my civilization. Sometimes, I admit I'll even take pleasure and find beauty in a wildly inefficient thing that nonetheless passes the threshold of "it works", however barely. Politics, states, institutions feel like that to me: it should all collapse under its own weight and complexity, and yet it goes on... fascinating feat. It's like e.g. Windows (the biggest codebase in existence, at least as reported a few years ago, 50 million lines iirc?), you have to revel at the wonder that it even works.
My wife does pretty much everything in a way that simply blows my mind. Probably once a day, I start to mutter "But, why....?" Most of the time she just looks at me like I'm the broken one, meanwhile I swear it's her!
Packing for a trip is the worst. For me, it's hours of over-analysis and optimization. Packing everything into a minimal volume. Ensuring nothing unneeded makes it way into a bag. For her, it's grab an armful of {whatever}, toss it in a suitcase, and assume it'll all work out. And yet, we both love traveling and we're equally as likely to forget something.
Making more money is what ultimately allows me to be lazy, so I just need to find a way to make enough money so I would have no more obligation to work.
In fact, afaik, it's kinda 'proven' loosely in psychology studies that "laziness" isn't a bad trait per se. In fact, from our ancestral laziness comes our drive to build things (systems, organizations, machines, civilization!) to do our job for us, anywhere from 'streamlining' to 'automating'.
Many great developers are self-reportedly very ambivalent between laziness and the drive to make things — alchemy notably happens when what you make today will let you be lazier tomorrow (you probably need to be at least 25 to 'feel' it though).
Of course, being a nerdy creature, you'll rinse and repeat indefinitely — there probably never will be a shortage of things to automate in your lifetime — but that's the spirit. As you said, we gotta keep ourselves busy to balance the lazy. ;-)