My observation is that the problems in software engineering tend to look simple until you actually try to build something larger than a toy. I gather that, if y

My observation is that the problems in software engineering tend to look simple until you actually try to build something larger than a toy. I gather that, if you have the relevant background in other engineering disciplines, the same deceptive simplicity applies. It's easy to dismiss the difficulties that arise in software as properties of the language, platform, framework, etc. that you're working with, except that we're a few decades into this whole software engineering thing and we're still inventing (and re-investing) tools to solve "simple" problems. Which, of course, is also true in many other engineering disciplines. Sure, the scale may get smaller or larger, but base issues like "this problem would be easy if I could just temporarily disable gravity" or "I've got the perfect mechanism for this if we can allow one solid to pass through another when we assemble it" still crop up with remarkable frequency. One might reasonably start to think that estimating the difficulty of problems is, in and of itself, harder than it looks.