And until a certain point, a programmer may not recognize when the code is out of hand. Even still, I sometimes spend an absurd amount of time working on something that seemed trivial, because it spent the whole day looking five minutes out of reach. Or a week looking an hour or two away. Those times don't generate callbacks because they don't seem like big enough problems.

Though if a manager polled me a couple of times that week, the second time I was the same distance into the same task, it would be a major trouble sign.