Okay it's a spicy take, because juniors also tend to write too smart code.

Figuring out what to do and how to do it, is maybe not hard but it's effort. It's a hidden thing because it's not flat coding time, it requires planning, research, exploration and cooperation.

It's also true that some seemingly simple things are very hard. There are probably countless workarounds out there and the programmer wasn't even aware he is dodging an NP hard bullet.

Both arguments are valid.

I think the weight leans on effort, because effort is harder to avoid. Work, complexity, cruft piles up, no matter what you do. But you can work around hard problems. Not always but often enough. Not every business is NASA and has to do everything right, a 90% solution still generates 90% returns, and no one dies.

Isn't this kind of true, though? Housing construction, for instance, isn't bottlenecked by the technical difficulties of building, but by political and regulatory hurdles. Or look at large, capital-intensive projects such as the always-proposed, never built new Hudson river train tubes. Actually building these will take billions of dollars and many years, but even they would be long built by now were it not for their constantly being blocked by political jockeying.

Building stuff _does_ often involve difficult technical challenges, but I still think that as a general aphorism the observation that this isn't the _hardest_ part holds true.

It might be that I have been doing this for too long and no longer see it.

That's not to discount the intensity of the labor. Just that the labor is rarely the bottleneck in building stuff.