[TheOtherHobbes]

There are problems that can be solved with a clever, elegant, minimal algorithm.

And there are problems that are tedious because there's a huge amount of not very well organised data, and you have to go through it case by case.

Especially true if you're trying to fully internationalise something.

Examples: verifying international addresses, dealing with sales taxes in various countries and jurisdictions, dealing with import/export codes. Etc.

There's nothing conceptually hard about these problems. But a complete solution is just a very long list of nested ifs, and there's nothing much anyone can do about that. (Except buy/hire an existing solution - if someone else has done the work.)

[klysm]

The tough thing about the problems that are just a long list of ifs is the shape of the data. It’s usually not clear till you’re very deep in the problem what the “right” data structures are. That’s problematic because those are the difficult things to change. I think it’s a very valuable skill to be able to sniff those out early.