About Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris can be considered as very good qualities for a programmer, as pointed out by Larry Wall in "Programming Perl".

Laziness: you don't want to do the same things again and again - and you start coding useful libraries.

Impatience: a good programmer will always try to find ways to work faster.

Hubris: Finally, a good programmer wants to be praised not only for results, but for the quality of the code he is writing.

This is all very true for professional coders, who have a solid background in programming. but certainly not true for everyone.

Website programming is probably the best example: I have met many professional web designers who have never taken a single programming course during their curriculum, and ended up doing web design, simply because the financial reward is very high compared to the time you need to invest in learning how to build a website. you just need a few month learning the basic of dreamweaver, and can claim the same wages as a C programmer working for embedded systems, and who has studied IT for years.

I am not saying here that people HAVE TO study it for years before being able to sell their services as web designers. However, I would strongly recommend them to avoid considering Laziness, Impatience and Hubris as qualities really.

Laziness: "cannot be asked to understand what this bloody code does - but it's taking me so much time to fix all these bloody rendering in different browsers - let's charge client double for all the hassle I am going through." OR "I cannot be asked to build a new design from scratch" - let's steal the design from an other site and cross fingers that my client has never come across it before.."

Impatience: "ok, this should be good enough, I really need to get the money in now, and I have already put too much time into this project now! I cannot carry on fixing bits and pieces for ever, need to pay my rent as well!" OR "pffu, didn't expect this to be so complicated to implement. And there are so many other clever things I have seen on other websites and which I would like to try out - let's stop working on this, this is good enough, I want to work on something new, more exciting"

Hubris: "These bloody clients don't understand how hard it is to build websites, and how clever you need to be in order to achieve results - if something is wrong and I try to explain them that there are extremely complicated things involved such as box model, table vs div layouts, etc .. but obviously they don't understand, they just want their website to work" OR "I have just created a website without using a sigle table, amazing!".