Developer superstition, never say something is easy, fast or straightfoward.

It will take weeks to develop, months to test and debug and you will consider change jobs just to stay away of that code

That bit me in the ass countless times

It is actually a perception problem. Sometimes, it can be attributed to overconfidence or lack of visibility into a problem masqueraded as full visibility into it

it's easy when you asked me but then you added 30 more things to it and now it ain't anymore

The problem is, your manager is the one who always claims that it's easy, not you. He said it was easy to the top management, and then push it on you.

Nah, I have a dev colleague that often starts sentences with "we simply can ..."

I am laughing my ass off every time. :'-D

Yes. Even when something is just 1 line of code - if someone bothered to ask ”how long it’ll take?” - that means there are stakeholders involved and thus every step of the process will be done more carefully and a lot of time will be spent communicating. The PR review will take longer and other devs will say ”I hear this was requested by a stakeholder - should we merge this now or after lunch? Do we need to set build it to a test env to show the stakeholder before we deploy? Do we need to set an alert to remember to notify someone else after the deploy?”

So I often say: 1 line of code can literally take me a couple minutes if no one cares how and when it is done.

1 line of code when a stakeholder is involved can take weeks to ship, and impact team productivity for the duration.

Cause you bet that ticket will be discussed at length every standup