This is attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general in WW1 and WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

I'm definitely smart and lazy. My previous manager was very smart and very hardworking. It was a hilarious nightmare. We both really liked each other as people, and respected each other's work, but our work styles were so completely at odds. Once she knew how to do something, she absolutely did not want to change how that process worked. On the other hand, I would change a process because I figured out a way to cut 15 minutes off a weeks worth of work.

There's a running joke at work that under no circumstances should someone complain to me about a problem, because I will drop everything to discover the cause of the problem, and then 2 days later the entire process will be rewritten. Everyone else thinks I'm working myself to the bone, but I'm rewriting processes that used to take several days to complete so they only take a couple of hours, and the computer does most of the work without input. In my mind its perfectly lazy, because it means I don't have to walk anyone through the procedure or fix any problems caused by humans gumming up the works.

Plus, it feels so good to say "What does the text next to the button say?" When someone calls to ask what they should do next.

I have a theory that most programmers are lazy, because a certain kind of lazy person goes "I'm sure there is a better way of doing this." and then that person goes on to figure out how. The only problem is that sometimes that type of person can get sucked into learning a new framework when they could have used the less efficient framework in the first place and already have been done.