Lacking any objective measure, we often judge how difficult a program is by how hard a programmer works on it. Using this sort of measure, we can easily fall into believing that the worst programmers are the best - because they work so hard at it. A case in point was a programmer who work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight weeks to get a small program running in a new installation. For his efforts, his company gave him an award for exceptional service. Shortly thereafter, another programmer was given the job of making some additions to this program. He found that the program was such a confusing mess that it was easier to rewrite it that to try and modify it.