This thread (http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/2980.aspx) over at Rory's blog reminds me of a story ...
This reminds me of a situation I found myself in while working at a well-know software vendor. We had just acquired another company and I was on the transition team. One of the most critical tasks was to migrate over all of the acquired company's CRM data into our system. Several weeks went by and this task was still outstanding. We has a meeting with the group of programmers working on doing the data migration. They said that the task would take at least another 2 weeks because of the complexity involved in remapping the data and applying the business logic so that it could be imported into our system. They had already written thousands of lines of C++ and SQL code to accomplish this task. The VP (a sales guy) in charge of the transition team was livid ... he just could not understand why this task was taking so long. The programmers (a team of 5 people) basically told him he didn't know what he was talking about and said that this was a complex undertaking. The dicussion got somewhat heated and the VP asked the rest of the transition team if there were any alternatives to the current approach.
I piped up and told him there was and if he gave me the databases he needed migrated, then I would have the data in our system the next day. The programmers burst out laughing and basically called me an idiot since I had no prior internal knowledge of either system. At this point, the VP was under the gun to get this thing completed so he told me to go ahead and make it happen ... so I did and by the time he got in the next morning all the data was imported into our system. We had our daily meeting and everyone was delighted except the five programmers. The VP asked how I accomplished this task in so little time.
I told him I installed our CRM client on 5 computers, created some Microsoft Test Scripts and pumped the data through the UI so that it could be validated and saved properly ... simple but effective. Everyone was thanking me for a job well done except the five programmers ... they basically accused me of cheating and said that any dumb idiot could have taken this approach. Not once did they accept that my solution was the best one.
Anyway .. to make a long story short, guess who got the bigger raise that year :-)