[Eupolemos]

I don't agree with you - you're presenting the view which is the exact position people here are trying to put words to why doesn't work (and often hate about their jobs).

But downvoting you is just as counterproductive as burning the devil's advocate and you have my upvote. I hope people will get a hold of their emotions.

I've just spent a month doing a script I thought I could do in a weekend. I didn't realize several of the difficulties inherent in the data, I didn't realize I'd have to up my game with regard to techniques in shuffling data and I didn't know I'd run into so many quirks in the programming language.

I didn't know what I didn't know. That's why I guessed wrong.

In everything you haven't done before, you don't know what you don't know - and only a small portion of those things could have been realized by spending some hours researching the work I needed to do. Those didn't pop up on my radar until I had to solve them :(

But that knowledge isn't without value. Knowing that it is doing stuff you haven't done before that is risky (timewise) means you can underscore when you have a high-risk assignment.