Re: Initiative or otherwise?

[chromatic]

Count me in strongly with clintp on this one. If programmer A's employment agreement doesn't require him to work weekends, I consider him insufficiently lazy.

I've been in both situations. In a salaried position where overtime is not expected, I don't work that way. A company can convince me to do the programmer A thing exactly once, in a situation of sufficient need. After that, it's a symptom of a poor development process, and it needs to be addressed. If that involves reeducating management, so be it.

[Abigail-II]

If programmer A's employment agreement doesn't require him to work weekends, I consider him insufficiently lazy.

It all depends of course. I've worked for several employers that were quite flexible with working hours - in that case, I don't mind being flexible as well. I don't mind working a day in the weekend if that means I can take a weekday off, or work two half days instead of two full days.

Abigail

[Anonymous Monk]

Given only the information in the post it seems prudent to assume that both A and B are roughly equivelant in skill level, and that neither have additional research on the matter (why bother comparing the efforts of A and B if you're allowed to fudge in that B is a better programmer and so knows he can do it faster, or you fudge in that B already knows of a partial solution and so knows he can do it faster with that as a basis). All we know is that both heard and accepted the assignment, that A jumped right into research and design and ignored the possibility of pre-existing solutions and wrote it in three days. B blew it off completely until Monday without looking at anything. Presuming relatively equal skill sets it would take B roughly three days to do it on his own just as for A. B banked everything on finding a suitable existing solution to modify at the last minute. A fairly sloppy attitude in my opinion, and something that is likely to be harder to correct than teaching A the value of prior art.

On the other hand, I happen to agree with both chromatic and clintp that Friday 4pm assignments with Tuesday deadlines is first and foremost a problem in management. Which is why I said that both A and B should be considering other employment.