What things "looks easy" but are actually quite difficult to do?

[MCMLXXXII]

I think most sports look easy when you see pro's do it on TV.

[God Save The King]

For a skilled professional programmer, it should be easy to fix bugs.

Coming up with ideas is tougher.

Depends tremendously on the type of bug and it's potential impact.

If you're dealing with a class project with a few hundred lines of code, I completely agree with you. In the real world, I don't. At my work our code base is several millions of lines for our entire web platform, and it's architected fairly nicely, so a lot of low level code is re-used everywhere. There are some minor bugs uncovered over the decades in the base of the code that, in theory, would be an easy fix. But the potential for breaking some edge case used by a big client is too great a risk when we can build code atop it that accounts for the error.

Then there are really weird or odd bugs that are just a nightmare to track down. Especially any runtime, deployment, or environment bugs. Every seasoned developer/engineer has their horror stories about some nightmare of a bug that haunted them for days/weeks.

One springs to mind. There was an issue with portability we had. We had developed and tested our software on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10, along with various Mac and Linux distributions. The code, in theory, should have been portable. However there was some obscure rounding bug in a specific version of Windows 8 when dealing with powers of 2. Eventually we were able to track the error down and do a manual equation instead of using built in functions. This bug was eventually patched in a Windows 8 fix but a fairly important client was still using this specific version and did not want to upgrade to a version our code worked on. It took over a week to track down, fix, and then another 2 weeks re-testing everything across all the platforms to make sure we didn't break anything elsewhere. I could easily have seen a world in which we lost that client due to not wanting to fix the bug. In fact that was our plan until they offered to pay extra for the bug to be fixed for them.

[Ghostpanther]

The whole COVID-19 thing and barbershops being closed in a lot of areas for a while pointed out how much easier it looks to cut hair than it actually is. I didn't actually try it myself (I just let my hair keep growing and managed it as best I could), but I've seen a lot of "self haircut fail" clips on YouTube since this whole thing began.

And my barber makes it look easy. He's done with me in like....10-15 minutes. But he makes it look easy because he's been cutting people's hair for a living something like 9 hours a day/5 days a week, for decades. I'm sure I could probably do a passable job if I were really careful, but I wouldn't be able to breeze through it with zero mistakes and have my hair look like it was cut by a professional by the end like he does.

Use barber clippers and do a burr cut and it is easy.

I think golf, which looks easy if you have never tried it, can be very hard to learn to play well. It is a unnatural body movement.

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It's the easiest thing to do, just create strawmen and accuse your opponent of being a communist/nazi if they disagree with your ideology.

Lol! So true. It is also so brave to hide behind the screen and act tough.

[Tuor]

Keep an old computer running. About everything can happen, from a simple bad contact (a PCI board, or a molex sufering from metal fatigue), to the most weird stuff, all can happen.

[Grimbold21]

The bloody bar chord, as a beginner learning the guitar.