Dealing with Lazy People in the Office
Today I had a really sad realization - there are a lot of lazy people in the world, and unfortunately, I have the pleasure of working with a few. These aren't the Code Monkeys I've written about several times - these are just really honest to goodness lazy people. Just looking to do the least work they have to do in order to get by. Fighting about it in meetings even. Amazing.
Case in point: Countries. We get the demand for things from a service that gives us location information as postal codes. In the US, that's great as a 5-digit zip code is just the right "size" for the localization of the demand. But in Canada, I found out that I should only be looking at the first three characters of the postal code. OK, I can do that, but the question then becomes: What country am I in?
I was thinking it would be a simple thing to have the service that generates this data to add that in. After all, it knows the postal code, so it's got to know the country - right? Well… as it turns out, it should, but it's written by some really bad coders, and it doesn't. And these bad coders are lazy to boot, and aren't interested in adding it.
OK, after about 30 sec of this "debate", I just said I'd do it. It took me about 30 mins to add this to my code, and now it's done. They later realized that they needed this as well, so they have hacked something together that I couldn't possibly care less about, but whatever. I have the country now.
I'm now able to map the postal codes right, but it's amazing how hard some people fight against making their code better - only to later realize that they should have made it better in the first place, and put another hack on a hack, etc.
Not me. Amazing people.