I could do that in a weekend (2016)

I often hear this logic from inexperienced engineers. My answer to them is: Then why don't you do it? <grin> Recently a junior engineer said this to me about Uber, and I helped him to understand - His logic was "it's just a taxi app". There were loads of Taxi apps before Uber and loads of them after Uber. Yet none of them were uber? Sure that a medium complexity CRUD app can do the pickup and scheduling, and spit…

To OP's point of "features are more complicated than they appear" I always like to point to the flowchart of Slack's notification logic. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg

One other thing he touched on in passing: people are assuming they'd know what to build from the start. Even in relatively trivial applications a lot of work goes into finding the right way to express what you're trying to build. I recently worked on a small app and spent 40 hours trying out different approaches to the user interface. The solution I went with could be coded up in about 2 hours, but I had to do 38 hours…

I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example. I think it's hard to argue (although some people clearly did) that making a search engine is easy. You need to index all of Internet, cache it maybe too, rank stuff, filter out spam, work over different languages, do something about images, parse a lot of (broken) HTML, maybe run some js to figure out what a dynamic page should show, then serve it…