6 Behaviors of Lazy People That Create Career Success
Not all lazy behaviors are valuable, and setting the right (productive) tone with your co-workers is important. But certain lazy traits are valuable, and should be encouraged.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice. I frequently write narrative stories about my work experiences. Like the below.
For the third time in two weeks, Vernon (my manager) said he’d like me to write a document. Clearly, I’d cemented my reputation as a document writer. At Amazon, being a skilled document writer as a manager is a good thing.
“Do you remember how we plan to launch that cost reduction feature with Visa?” he said. “We need a 2-pager explaining the goals of the project, next steps, and challenges involved. Could you get that done by Friday?”
“Sure thing” I said.
I didn’t mind writing, and writing these types of strategy docs felt like a good move for my career. Vernon had accepted my past two docs without complaint or feedback, so I figured he was happy with whatever I was writing. I was fairly new to the organization, so I was pretty happy that I was already able to contribute.
I spent a bit of time researching next steps on the Visa project, and attending various meetings. One of my meetings that day was with Cecelia, Vernon’s manager (my skip manager). We had a one-on-one meeting every few weeks to keep in touch. This is a common practice at Amazon for leaders with larger organizations.
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“How is your team doing?” Cecelia asked.
“They’re doing quite well.” I said. “I’ve started organizing some team events. We’re doing quite a lot together as a team.”
“Great!” Cecelia said. “Team morale events are a critical part of team productivity.”
Cecelia was very focused on productivity, and effective social engagement to drive getting things done. I also wondered occasionally if she was a robot.
“Yes, I think the team is doing great. We’ve gone to the shooting range now quite a few times.” I said.
Cecelia’s eyes got large. “I’m not sure a shooting range is a good idea for a team event.” she said.
“Oh yeah? I suppose I could encourage the team to find other social activities?” I said. Time to change the subject. I didn’t think it was any of her business really, but it’s not the type of hill you want to die on.
“That would be good. What else have you been working on?” she said.
“I’m currently writing a strategy doc for the cost reduction feature with Visa.” I said.
Cecelia straightened up in her chair. “Is this the first document you’ve written?” she asked, in a fake casual voice. She didn’t fool me.
My brain started moving quickly. Something was going on.
“No, I also wrote the payment instrument storage strategy document last week, and earlier this week I wrote a deep dive into the maintenance costs of our platform.” I said.
“I see.” she said. And then she sat there for a few moments.
“Vernon presented those documents as his own. With his name on them.” Cecelia said. “I asked him to write those documents, and he didn’t mention that he’d had assistance.”
I was surprised at two things immediately.
First, that Vernon would present my documents as his own, considering I didn’t think he fully understood them. It’s not like he was in all our meetings on the topic.
Second, that Cecelia would tell me about something strange my manager was doing. Because managers don’t usually leak performance information to others. Particularly others who report to the person having (perhaps) performance issues.
“Look at this document.” Cecelia said. She pulled a document from her desk over to her meeting table. “Is this what you wrote? Was much changed?” she asked.
Ok, this was clearly an investigation. I was going to have to be careful going forward. It felt like a dangerous situation.
“I don’t see anything changed in the doc.” I said after looking at it for a minute. Then I paused. “Well, I had my name at the top before. I do see that Vernon put his name on top of the document and removed mine.”
Cecelia frowned, but didn’t look horribly surprised. I was suspicious that this wasn’t the first clue that something wasn’t quite right with Vernon.
“Here’s what I want you to do.” Cecelia said. “I’m going to ask Vernon to write a document outlining where his team has operational issues, and how he’d like to address them for next year. I’m going to explicitly tell him to write it himself, and not delegate it to his team. Please tell me if he asks you to write this.”
I nodded, it was clear where we were now. I was involved in some type of strange entrapment scheme to see if Vernon was pretending to do his job. Lovely. But considering Vernon wasn’t my favorite person, this wasn’t the worst thing in the world. If my manager and his manager were in a disagreement, I certainly wanted to be on my skip manager’s side.
I went back to my desk, and worked on various things. Not two hours later, Vernon knocked on my office door.
“Hold off on that Visa cost reduction document. I have something else I need you to work on first.” he said.
No way. Really? Was this going to actually happen?
“I need you to write a document about our organization’s operational issues. I know you’re great at ops, and I think this is a good opportunity for you.” he said. “Explain what our issues are, what we’re doing about it this year and next.”
I nodded. “Sounds good. I can do that.” I said.
But my mind was saying, “Holy smokes!”
“Oh…” he started to say. As if he just thought about something he’d almost forgotten to mention.
“Don’t mention to anyone that you’re working on this.” he said. “I have an idea of how to get our team more headcount, and I’d like you to keep this quiet.”
Holy smokes. He’s not just getting me to do his work. He’s blatantly covering it up, too.
“Sure thing.” I said, absolutely lying.
After Vernon left my office, I casually went to the kitchen for water. And then swung by Cecelia’s office. She was alone in the office, which was convenient.
“Hey Cecelia.” I said. “Vernon just asked me to write a document about our organization’s operational issues.”
Her eyebrows went up. “That was fast. Ok, I’ll take it from here. Thanks.” she said.
The next day, there was a meeting on our team’s calendar from Cecelia, scheduled for 9am. Which, frankly, was before many of my team members would arrive in the office. But Cecelia didn’t appreciate that aspect of software engineering schedules. I could see that the invitation went to all of Vernon’s teams.
I showed up at the meeting room, with a scattering of software engineers, and all of Vernon’s direct reports (mostly managers).
“Vernon has resigned his position effective immediately.” Cecelia said. “You will all report to me until we find a replacement. Otherwise, nothing changes. Please carry on unless you have any questions.”
With that detailed pep talk, it was over. Vernon was gone, never to be seen again. Oh, and he removed his connection with me on LinkedIn. Not terribly surprising.
What’s the point of that long story? Well, I thought, “This article is about laziness. I feel like starting this article with a story about laziness. What’s the most dramatic lazy situation I can remember?” And once I started typing out the story as best I could remember, it ended up being roughly a thousand words. Whoops. I just enjoy writing these stories.
Being lazy didn’t work out for Vernon. However, I’d argue that many behaviors we might consider lazy are valuable in the workplace. And I’m going to walk through a few of them.
1. Automate tasks
This is the cliché example. There’s a popular saying: “Lazy engineers automate things, which makes them good engineers.” And it’s a popular saying because it’s true. It’s great when engineers automate things.
But I’ve repeatedly seen people or teams leave small bits of manual tasks sitting around. They’ll automate a complex database backup process. But that alarm that goes off every Wednesday at noon? They click on the ticket, and just dismiss the alarm.
“Why haven’t you fixed that alarm?” I’ll ask.
“Oh, it only takes 30 seconds to dismiss the alarm.” they’ll say. “It’s a false alarm due to server maintenance every Wednesday. It’s easiest just to dismiss it.”
Except that a problem never takes 1 minute, and ignoring these small bits of automation is a bad idea. Why?
Because the alarm interrupts someone, and task switching is expensive.
When someone needs to take over this (or any) task, ramping them up on exactly what’s going on will take time.
If you forget about doing a manual step, it doesn’t get done. Or it’s done by someone else in the wrong way.
Humans make mistakes, and manual steps open the door for mistakes.
In this type of case, the false alarm could someday be a real alarm, and the team wouldn’t know because they’d likely dismiss it as the “normal false alarm.”
I’ve always estimated any task at a minimum of 15 minutes. When you’ve changed your evaluation of the issue from 30 seconds to 15 minutes, it changes the value proposition for that automation work.
Now, it does depend on the flavor of lazy we’re talking about. Some people are lazy, and will quietly dismiss the alarm every week instead of doing any work. Other people are lazy, and will say, “I’m so tired of having to click that dumb alarm during my lunch. I’m going to fix that alarm so that I’ll never have to do that again.”
And that employee is priceless. That employee might spend 2 hours fixing the alarm, but I’m convinced it will pay you back in just a few weeks. And that lazy engineer doesn’t get distracted during their 2.5 hour lunch. So it’s win-win.