A Lazy Coder != A Good Coder

Recently, a co-worker recently shared a quote with the group:

working as a programmer is the 1st time in history where lazy people (w.o. connections or personal wealth) get payed well to be even more lazy

I take issue with this on a number of levels, but mainly that this seems to be a common theme in the programming world, that a lazy programmer is akin to a good programmer. This can't be further from the truth.

A lazy programmer:

• takes harmful shortcuts and hacks his features into production code
• doesn't take the time to think about how his module will behave in the context of the larger system
• writes poor (or no) unit tests
• doesn't care to understand how the API he is using works
• cuts and pastes code
• uses global variables

I definitely would not want to have a lazy programmer on my team, or contributing in any way to my codebase.

What I think people must mean (hopefully!) is that a good programmer automates when he can. A good programmer is conscientious, meticulous, and thorough.