Software Engineer: Work Hard vs Work Smart?

Are you a work hard or a work smart software engineer? Actually you can have both work hard and work smart depend on the situation.

Jul 11, 2023

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Intro

Work Hard and Work Smart are two phrases often used in the context of productivity and success.

Work hard emphasizes the importance of putting in effort, dedicating time, and having a strong work ethic to achieve goals.

Work smart emphasizes the efficiency of your effort to maximize the result.

Over 80% of the software engineers I've met claim to be a smart worker rather than hard worker, but most of them are just average software engineers. On the other hand, those who call themselves hard worker are mostly great engineers.

How can this happen?

In today's discussion, we will be talking about work hard, work smart, and the misconceptions about them. Initially, I am not a fan of working smart. Why? Let's find out.

Fake Smart Workers

Every time I conduct an interview with a software engineer, one question that I often ask is:

Do you work hard or work smart?

My intention in asking this question is to understand their work behavior, especially to determine if they are lazy (continuous learner) or not.

I don't directly ask, "Are you a hard worker?" because the answer is easy to fabricate.

On the other hand, adding work smart as a comparison makes the results more interesting. If the engineer answers with "I am a hard worker," then they are likely telling the truth. Because if they are not, answering with "work smart" is more appealing and cool.

More than 80% of them answer with "work smart," and most of them (not all) are fake.

How can I know?

When I add a follow-up question, "What's the proof?" they cannot answer it.

Note: Now I need to remove this question 😂

Work Hard vs Work Smart (Misconception)

Are there any people who claim to be smart workers without faking it?

The answer is yes, but not many. However, that's not the real problem. The real problem lies in why we need to choose between those two.

I would say that this misconception arises in society because many people, including coaches, influencers, and motivators, glorify working smart over working hard.

I believe that working smart can be achieved after working hard enough.

Becoming a smart worker isn’t easy

Let's discuss this with an example (which actually happened in real life).

Imagine you are working in a company that uses Kubernetes as its infrastructure. You are managing hundreds of microservices, and there's a problem with the deployment process. It becomes a hurdle when you have to write the YAML files one by one.

One of the smart moves is to "create a tech tool" to automate the deployment. However, to achieve that, you need:

Understanding of how Kubernetes works
Strong technical proficiency to develop the tool
Designing a suitable tool
Dedicated time to develop it
And more

If you look at the list above, it becomes clear that you need to work hard to learn and gain experience in many areas. If you haven't worked hard enough, you may not even be aware that you can create a tool to solve the problem.

Hard Work first then learn to work smartly

Working smart has prerequisites, unlike working hard, which everyone is capable of doing. Therefore, in order to work smartly, you need to acquire a lot of knowledge and experience. All of this can be achieved by investing a significant amount of time.

Once you have gained a substantial amount of knowledge and experience, it's time for you to learn how to work smart. This is crucial because there are many people who stop at working hard. After acquiring a vast amount of knowledge, they fail to learn how to work smartly, leading to burnout.

Herry, Are you Work Hard or Work Smart?

I will answer it by saying both. It depends on the situation, but essentially, I am a hard worker.

Here are some actions where I adopt a work hard approach:

When learning and keeping up with new technology.
Spending time writing thescalable every day.

Here are some actions where I adopt a work smart approach:

Solving recurring problems by building tech tools.
When it comes to prioritization and planning, I tend to find ways to limit the scope while still achieving the goals.

TL;DR

You can't work smart if you haven't worked hard enough, especially in the field of software engineering. You need to invest effort in learning, gaining fundamentals, and more before you can utilize them to become work smart.

It's not about choosing between working hard or working smart. They can even be used together. There are instances where you work smart on one task and work hard on another.

That’s it for today, thank you for reading! If you find it valuable, don’t forget to: