Comment by proper_elb

Heh, I don't think that will ever really change. What changes in my experience is your knowledge and confidence when it comes to translating requirements into maintainable technology. The real world stuff seems to be always messy. My attitude is to try to locate areas of potential unknown risk, plan how to deal with the known risk and then hack away, knowing that no matter how much time spent, the plan will be flawed. During this whole process, communication is really important (i.e. 30% feedback, where I just write comments of what I would change in the codebase and then talk about it with a collegue)