It sometimes hurt for sure. I remember an incident when my boss asked me to arrange and check few mysql tables and arrange them in excel. I told myself, “oh God, it will take atleast an hour and such a hectic work. I will do a small program for it”. It just took me almost 3 hours before my boss shouted at me for being lazy and over possessed with programming. I finally did it manually but realized that I am really born lazy and thus an artistic programmer. I love programming and I can spend hours and days to see a final product smiling.
The first paragraph was to say that almost all programmers are Lazy and Dumb. I also want to share an amazing article on this topic (Philipp, this is one my fav blog post), http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-08-24-n14…
We had some incidents when our programmers were smart and ended up with laugh.
We programmed for IP telephony with Asterisk (the open source PBX) and the set various options, option 1 to talk to consultant and option 2 to something and so on.
One customer shouted at our customer care, “Why the hell do you need to do a blood test for counseling?, bloody option # 5“. We relooked at the option and it said press 5 for podcasting (lol).
Another incident. I asked a customer, “Tell me your Internet browser and then I will be able to help”. Customer, “I have a PC, if you can tell me how does a Internet browser look like then I can tell you”.
A programmer certainly needs to be dumb and ask all the dumb question to make the program really simple. I am lazy but failing to be dumb and working very hard to be dumb.