> have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is. I think the older

> have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is. I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least! In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it. It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.