> Not using knowledge and tools to amplify what I do, but spending 60% of my time confused as hell about something which should be obvious and is only obvious a

> Not using knowledge and tools to amplify what I do, but spending 60% of my time confused as hell about something which should be obvious and is only obvious afterwards, 20% trying to convince people of things they're often reluctant to believe, and 20% actually using built up knowledge and tools to do many many things very quickly. It's frustrating. It also creates some nasty perverse incentives. Because if you spend the hours to find the best way to do something that should be simple, it often turns out to actually be simple. API function #487 does just exactly what you need, if only it hadn't taken seven hours to find it. So then you spend a day writing five lines of code that should have taken half an hour, but in the end you have a good solution. But there is an alternative to that. You can reinvent the wheel. Instead of spending your time understanding the unnecessarily complicated thing with poor documentation, write some new code to do just your thing. And who looks more productive to the boss? The one who spent all day to write five lines of code, or the one who added a complex new feature that clearly took a lot of time and effort (but will now take ten times more effort to maintain)? This is especially nasty because it's not always an obvious answer. Sometimes the existing wheel is made of glass and is shaped like a triangle and reinventing it is totally worth it, and then you spend all day discovering that and still have to spend tomorrow doing what a lazier person did yesterday. Whereas without the unnecessary complexity the right answer would have been obvious much sooner.