The thing that really rings true in this story for me is the difficulty that management sometimes has understanding how hard the things we do are. It particula

The thing that really rings true in this story for me is the difficulty that management sometimes has understanding how hard the things we do are. It particularly shows up in cases that might sound like this one, where the solution is simple but hard to see. For instance, I recently corrected a bug in my code that had been there for a long time. The final code is dead simple. But it took years to detect the bug, and weeks of hard work and analysis to figure out that simple solution. (And of course, who knows -- maybe it's not as hard as I thought, and if I were just brilliant enough I would have instantly seen the solution. If I have no clue what the truth of the matter is, how is my (hypothetical) one step removed boss supposed to make sense of it?)