Cherish Smart but Lazy People | Hacker News Reader

Cherish Smart but Lazy People

onesock.net

18 pointsblewis10 comments

This seems to be a more boring paraphrase of Nazi general Knut von Hammerstein-Equord's "I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord)

Not only is his take more interesting, it somehow carries more weight hearing from a Nazi general. Thanks for the link.

Wikipedia seems to think he was anything but a Nazi: 'Hammerstein-Equord was involved in several plots to overthrow Hitler' etc.

He was a Prussian. To students of military history, that says it all.

Sensible. The reason why you want smart / "lazy" people at the top is that they will delegate, and because they're smart, they will tend to delegate well.

Stupid people don't tend to make very good programmers, no matter how industrious they are.

ranking people based on their roles in a company is a poor perspective. respecting everyone and not putting them in tidy (and possibly insulting) boxes is a better perspective.

Ranking people has nothing to do with the people themselves. It's supposed to make the company more efficient.

Stupid and lazy people are just a drain on your company. But stupid and industrious people are far more dangerous, they may put in enough work to produce value but it may come at an even greater cost in technical debt.

To quote from this Glenn Vanderberg blog post: http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/sharp_an...

"Weak developers will move heaven and earth to do the wrong thing. You can’t limit the damage they do by locking up the sharp tools. They’ll just swing the blunt tools harder."

Yeah sure. Every human being in a company can be reduced to 2 qualities.

At least he could have read about the Big 5 or the MBTI, made by people who gave a bit more thought about how to categorize human beings.

Although there are people who are genuinely lazy, most of the time the problem is lack of motivation.

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