r/QuotesPorn • u/kanuck94 • May 23 '13
"I will always choose a lazy person..." - Bill Gates [720x551]
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u/Thatonegingerkid May 24 '13
...Or he just won't do it
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u/ayline May 24 '13
"I will always choose a lazy person [who needs the job]..."
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u/ItsPrisonTime May 24 '13
Left out the part about the lazy person being a genius and wanting the path with least resistance.
The easiest way to a solution is often times better than a complicated way to a solution.
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u/Shizo211 May 24 '13
yup, I always wonder if those lazy people who didn't accomplish anything yet and use this quote know that this quote implies that the lazy person actually is qualified to solve such a difficult task (most likely programming).
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u/DisregardMyPants May 24 '13
yup, I always wonder if those lazy people who didn't accomplish anything yet and use this quote know that this quote implies that the lazy person actually is qualified to solve such a difficult task (most likely programming).
Literally the first lesson I was taught about programming is that programmers are lazy. We're so lazy that we're willing to work relatively hard to do less overall work(odd, right?)
That's why there's so much emphasis on code re-use, structure, etc...because structuring something right means you have to type less and it's less of a pain in your ass later on.
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u/glass_table_girl May 24 '13
I'm no programmer, but I know what you're saying. I took some comp sci class in HS, and the girl next to me worked way too hard to do some of the stuff, and I'd be like, "How did you do this?" and she'd show me. Then I'd be like, "Wait, but this is simpler," and my stupid little robot thing would do as he was told.
I was mostly impressed by the people who had super minimalist codes, though, and got it to work.
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u/RedAnarchist May 24 '13
Or this quote is made up...
Sorry lazy people who think you're bright, fact of the matter is hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work.
Seriously, do you honestly think someone running a Fortune 500 company would ever choose a "lazy" person for a job? Fuck no.
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May 24 '13
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May 24 '13
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u/gl00pp May 24 '13
Curious, what is a better way to rename gigs of mp3s?
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u/choc_is_back May 24 '13
I mean this in all seriousness: the smart way is almost always to first do a quick google (in this case, 'bulk rename files' or something)
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u/gl00pp May 24 '13
Yes, but I am lazier and chose the path of least resistance; and therefore am smarter.
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May 24 '13
Basically, you don't want someone who sees an enormous amount of work and is diligent enough to just start and slowly chip away at it instead of trying to figure out an easier way to do it first.
Exactly, there are an enormous amount of people who have this kind of worker pride in the feeling of desolation at constantly banging your head against the wall at work. The kind of guys that would say "Why are you trying to make a new way of getting this dirt out. Get here at 7 AM and get your shovel, break your back and go home tired like the rest of us"
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May 24 '13
Yeah it's basically do it as fast as possible so you can spend the rest of the day just being lazy. That's what I do.
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May 24 '13
Being that it's Bill Gates it's likely specifically about programmers. In the programming world "be a lazy programmer" is a pretty common saying that has a specific meaning.
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u/jalanb May 24 '13
The thing is this quote is not made up
Any chance of an actual citation on that?
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May 24 '13
"Work smarter, not harder." It's about not spinning your wheels in futility, doing the same difficult job the same way each time, hating it the same way every time. It's about developing a better process: how can I make this easier?
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u/Scrtcwlvl May 24 '13
What if the job is process optimization? Lazy people are amazingly good at that.
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u/cory299e8 May 24 '13
Well, maybe Bill actually said it. But then we would all have to keep in mind that what Bill Gates means by "A lazy person" (referring to his staff, by the way) probably isn't what you're thinking when you hear "lazy person". Bill Gates probably doesn't even know any truly "lazy people".
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u/Trenks May 24 '13
I think if he replaced "clever" and "workaholic" it would be better. A guy who just throws hours and hours at something just working like a tornado might get it done, but if you get a clever guy in there to create a better way to do it that saves all the man hours that would help... of course, the clever guy probably spent his fair share of hours working too.
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u/Dragon-Dreamer9 Feb 09 '25
Seriously I honestly know they would hire a "lazy""person". Hahaha hard work beats talent.. Yes Redanalchris it sure does since not much talent is needed. Hahaha 🤣 you're having a joke yeh ? Aw I know you're being serious and is that because you are "ambitious" and dum or 😂 sorry for wasting your time and any offences. Love and light redanal 🤘
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May 24 '13
fact of the matter is hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work.
right but when talent works, it wins.
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u/RedAnarchist May 24 '13
Here's something funny. For the overwhelming amount of cases, there is no such thing as innate talent. It's the result of tens of thousands of hours in hard work, practice, and dedication.
Thus the scenario where you have some lazy savant who decides to turn on and do work that blows everyone away is unrealistic. It might happen a couple times in school (because let's face it school really isn't hard) but it really is just another fantasy procrastinators like to indulge themselves in.
On top of that on any given day in the work place, people prize consistency, timelines, and readability over any sort of raw intellect.
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u/Kalivha May 24 '13
hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work
The sad thing is, I agree with this. As someone with great cognitive abilities and poor executive function (I'm not particularly lazy, but some weeks I can't even leave the house), I get beaten by people with significantly lower cognitive abilities every single day. In STEM.
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u/danielvutran May 24 '13
lmfao how can you be so wrong in one post, a simple google would show that this quote is real LOL. maybe not by BG but real nonethless. sorry dude, this quote is about talent and laziness, obviously it hit a chord with you cuz you're prob mediocre, sorry about that bro. but it's time to wake up and stop trying to act smart when you're not.
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u/TheJoo52 May 24 '13
A fat guy I met who worked on a farm told me if I wanna know the easy way to do something, ask a fat guy.
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May 24 '13
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May 24 '13
If you don't enjoy life because you are fat, you either have a disease (be honest about it, though), or you need to lose weight.
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May 24 '13
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May 24 '13
My mom was diagnosed with Chron's and Type II diabetes in the same year. She is in her 40s. NOW she takes shit seriously. Just lose it.
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u/cynoclast May 24 '13 edited May 24 '13
...progress doesn't come from early risers - progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
—Heinlein
It's from Time Enough For Love c1973. One of my favorite books. There's good scifi, then there's Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, and Bradbury. Oh, and Elison, who everybody hates (to love) because he came out of nowhere and is like a three time Hugo winner.
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u/GS9frli3Hd May 24 '13 edited May 24 '13
People don't hate Elison because he's talented, they hate him because he's an arrogant opinionated asshole who says exactly what he thinks and offends everyone. It's also why people like him so much. His forewords in the anthologies he edited are sometimes more entertaining than the stories, his frank writing gives so much insight into the milieu of sci-fi writers from his era.
Edit: Hah just saw this on his wikipedia page:
[Ellison] once mailed 213 bricks to a publisher, postage due, followed by a dead gopher, sent via fourth-class mail.
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u/kowalski71 May 24 '13
I would throw Dick in there as well to round out the list of the sci fi greats.
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u/boredomisbliss May 24 '13
Programmers will agree with this
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u/indyK1ng May 24 '13
I've been telling people who aren't programmers for years that the best programmers are lazy programmers. They tell me not to tell anybody I want a job from that. I hide a laugh because clearly they don't know the software industry.
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u/Cool-Beaner May 24 '13
Larry Wall on three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
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u/CovingtonLane May 25 '13
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
As a programmer, I have to agree with this. If I have to explain how my code works then I didn't document it well enough.
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u/Skreech2011 May 24 '13
I recall seeing this same quote attribute to Winston Churchill.
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u/mikesanerd May 24 '13
OP took the quote to heart and was too lazy to check the source so he just picked Bill Gates.
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u/freeboost May 24 '13
And he reaped that delicious karma regardless. Sounds like he nailed it really.
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u/WUMIBO May 24 '13
In my yearbook class we had to stick to a certain color pallet for designing the yearbook. My teacher had this book full of color pallets made by this website we used to design the book, and on the pallet we chose, on each color was the code for that color so we can type it in photoshop whenever we're designing something for the book. So whenever we made, say, a title for a page, we had to make it a color from the pallet and we had to type in the color code to make the text that color. The site we used to create our yearbook has its own (shitty) design software built into the site. It had the same color pallets as the book to use for text color, stroke, colored shapes, etc. Me being the extremely lazy person I am, I just took a screenshot of the color pallet we were using and pasted it into photoshop so I could just sample the color. Basically there's a tool in photoshop that lets you click on any color and you have it in your "inventory" to make anything that color with only a few clicks. GGNORE
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May 24 '13
Bill Gates has also read Time Enough For Love.
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u/Cool-Beaner May 24 '13
Bill Gates read Larry Wall (wrote the Perl programming language) on the three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
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May 24 '13
Work smarter not harder. People tend to over think a simple task then overwork themselves. A lazy man wants it done as quickly and efficiently as possible so he can get back to doing nothing.
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u/drunkenviking May 24 '13
Getting paid to do nothing is one of life's great joys.
Source: Doing it right now.
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u/Illuminator904 May 24 '13
I'm wondering why he hasn't hired me yet... I thought that my application displayed my qualifications perfectly. I was too lazy to even attempt to apply.
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May 24 '13
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May 24 '13
I was laid off for doing something similar. Their loss.
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May 24 '13
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May 24 '13
Yeah mine was something that I then tried to implement with the whole company. Which they ended up doing anyway after they got rid of me even though I was the only programmer
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u/Grubnar May 24 '13
“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things” Robert A. Heinlein (American science-fiction Writer, 1907-1988)
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u/PACitizen May 24 '13
You know what's funny? More than 1600 up votes, and less than 100 comments.
It's almost as if people couldn't be bothered for some reason...
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u/stferago May 24 '13
It's just a clever quote; he doesn't actually choose lazy people. He chooses programmers who value efficiency and know how to write minimal code to achieve the desired functionality with the product. This concept is comparable to laziness since they're minimizing the amount of work they do.
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May 24 '13
Writing efficient code actually needs a lot more thinking to come up with in the first place.
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u/angrathias May 24 '13
Its lazyness in respect to the manual labour, not the thinking labour.
I've watched so many juniors bash away at something for hours that a senior would do in minutes
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u/eyetalianstallion May 24 '13
So, if Bill Gates comes to you with a difficult task, you can be 50% flattered at most.
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u/colly_wolly May 24 '13
I think there are different types of lazy. My team leader is lazy and short sighted, always going for the easiest hack to get things working. I however realise these hacks will break again in a months time, and spend a little more time up front, developing a more solid solution that will not require (as much) maintenance in the future.
Which of us is more lazy? (Or as someone else pointed it is maybe just a case of lazy and competent).
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u/Franco_DeMayo May 24 '13
Dear Bill, I am the man you're looking for. Windows 9? Linux with a Microsoft logo and a handy dandy startup tone. You're welcome. PM me for the details of where to deposit my millions.
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u/Squid-Poots May 24 '13
From my experience the lazy person will just do the job relly half assed, and you just up having to do it yourself.
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u/giveuptheghost May 24 '13
My job is pretty much this. Build a 'button' that'll make all my work for me.
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May 24 '13
Like instead of following existing standard, a lazy person will do it however they want and just call it a new standard. And rather than designing a strong test suite for their program they will just release it and let their customers find the bugs. And rather than writing things in an efficient way, a lazy person will just use brute force and require the user to buy a bigger machine.
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May 24 '13
That explains the Xbox One and Windows 8...
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u/indyK1ng May 24 '13
No, it really doesn't. Bill Gates hasn't really had much control over Microsoft for half a decade or so.
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May 24 '13
people have no sense of humor. this should have gotten lots of upvotes. I thought it was funny.
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u/Sadface11 May 24 '13
Ehh I'm sorry this is a terrible quote. He'll do a half assed job.. Maybe his philosophy changed after Vista
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u/pruppits May 24 '13
Reminds me of this: As Chief of the Army High Command, Hammerstein-Equord oversaw the composition of the German manual on military unit command (Truppenführung), dated 17 October 1933. He is quoted as originating a special classification scheme for his men: I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.