I know the feeling. I had a report (excuse me business intelligence query with nice printing) that I was working on that took up north of a couple of hundred h

I know the feeling. I had a report (excuse me business intelligence query with nice printing) that I was working on that took up north of a couple of hundred hours. My problem was that I had to do the business logic (and gather a huge amount of domain knowledge) too. It was something of an effort, and I didn't make it to the shop for the key for a long while. The best you can do is document, almost diary style, all of things you are doing to get to the goal and hope you have a project manager that will provide support and resources to get it all done. Frankly, all of my notes (which eventually went on a wiki for our group) helped in doing so much more. Honestly, I think the whole question of "do you need domain knowledge to complete the task?" should be something to consider. Many folks do programming that isn't the same at each company and this tends to generate a different path that might not have a 'Canary MacGuffin' until very late in the process. I also think that the whole "stupid task" is often mixed in the whole need / don't need domain knowledge. Many "stupid tasks" are related to the business process and often colored by not having technical resources with domain knowledge. I once ran into a developer who thought it was stupid that we wanted some calculated amounts stored in the database. He didn't understand that other parts (oh, like the billing system) would have a problem redoing the calculation. Extreme, but one person's stupid is another person's ability to get paid.