I think (at least, I hope) what OP was trying to get at was the relative irrationality of something 1/8000th the cost of the very expensive item taking a very long time to debate through (especially when $100,000 is most probably far less than many of those board members earn as a salary every year)
As Programmers we deal with numbers a lot more often, so this effect is minimized. But still there.
If you want a good result don’t skimp on the tools. Buy good quality brushes, rollers, filler, throws and paint. Also buy an edger to cut in the walls and ceilings. One final tip buy some of the disposable plastic liners for the roller tray so you don’t have to spend time washing out the tray at the end of the day.
On the sand paper front make sure to spend money there. Cheap sandpaper last 2 nanoseconds and does a terrible job.
On the other hand, coming from a country that takes its trades extremely serious, I was shocked about what I observed every time I visited the UK. It seems the expectations vary drastically between different countries (though I'm sure there are quality professionals in the UK too).
House price / rent value is basically dependent on location. Money spent on fitting is generally wasted.
There are a lot of great craftsmen in the UK, but they tend to work on a subset of jobs - restoration, passion projects, really high-end stuff.
PS: This is also a direct result of ever-rising house prices. If land/house prices are consistently rising, it often makes more sense to let lots stay empty, rather than building (which is always a massive risk). It also makes sense to do any repair or upkeep work as cheaply as possible - since in a rising market, the only way you can lose money is by expensive development costs.
1 - there are very good professionals, but they aren't cheap and have all the work they need
2 - an amateur can always decide to take economically irrational amounts of time on a project; a professional can't.
So the result is that as a careful amateur you can end up with a job you probably wouldn't be able to convince yourself to pay for.
We can probably all agree that the worst case is the careless amateur....
I am not sure that description is apt. Underdelivering is only rational for the painter because the client won't be on the market long enough to gather sufficient information. The client is getting cheated, and it creates a lemons market, the fact that it is a Nash equilibrium does not make avoiding the entire thing irrational.
And the entire thing has parallels on software development...
An amateur painter will often spend far more time than any reasonable estimation of the market value of that job would justify. Part of this is lack of efficiency and experience, but another part is doing things with sharply diminishing returns. For example, you might apply expensive techniques to inexpensive materials, in a way that would not make for a viable business.
Put it another way - amateurs can easily arrive at a finished job (of painting, in this case) that they would never be able to convince themselves to pay market rate for. This is irrational in certain restricted senses.
For what it's worth I don't believe that "lemons market" is accurate for painters in general, but I'm guessing there is a segment of it that meets your description.
If you're looking at it from a economic standpoint, to be considered irrational, the tradeoff between the value of time vs the cost of hiring a professional would have to assume that the value of the time is greater than the value of the professional.
I always hear this compared to "what is your hourly rate in your job" or "my time is worth more than that", but I think for most people this just isn't a fair comparison. Just because I can spend 10 hours painting my room and I make $x/hour and it would cost <$x to pay a professional, does not mean I would be able to actually generate an _incremental_ $x per hour by not painting and hiring the professional.
For most people on a salary (where your pay is fixed no matter how much time you put in), their time outside of the job is, in a very real sense from an economic standpoint, valueless, and it would be perfectly rational to spend that time yourself, no matter how cheaply a professional could do it.
If you're looking at it from a economic standpoint, to be considered irrational, the tradeoff between the value of time vs the cost of hiring a professional would have to assume that the value of the time is greater than the value of the professional.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we are really disagreeing much.
Even on the financial level tradesmen here in Australia are so overpaid (compared to everyone else) that it makes sense even for me to do it myself. My house was painted by "professionals" just before we moved in (purple??) and it cost the previous owner $20,000. My wife and I repainted it white (this required 5 coats of paint) and it took us two weeks including the time I had to spend getting the purple paint off the windows and floors and patching all the holes that had been painted over.
Tip. If you are selling your home don't paint it some unusual color. I managed to buy my home $200K under its actual market value and quite a bit of this was due to the crazy way the place has been painted.
I have used gray before to go from red to yellow as it seems to work in fewer steps.
My parents (not in any way experts on that field) painted their entire house themselves, except for two rooms that were painted by a professional painter, and the professional painter left much worse corners than my parents. This was the paid-for result (ignore the dark corner at the bottom, that’s caused by the flash): https://i.imgur.com/s1VHV2W.jpg
Actually good software engineering is a much larger skill difference.
Based on my years across various companies, the difference between "hobbyist" and "mediocre professional" developer/programmer is close to nil
Also, note that this thread started with a comment about how many developers don't appreciate what the actual hard problems in their own line of work are, and how that produces poor results because of that. I expect that to be true of any profession that doesn't have some kind of rigorously enforced standard.
Painting isn't a profession with a particularly high return on experience. You hire a painter for comparative-advantage reasons. It may take him just as long as it takes you, and several thousand dollars more, but chances are you can make more than several thousand dollars in the time you would've spent painting your house. (If you can't, you may want to re-think hiring a professional, and instead go into business as a painter yourself...)
I find I can do most such works better than (average) professionals, but it takes a lot of time to learn, prepare, execute (+ sometimes re-execute) and clean. It all depends on when you are satisfied with the result.
For UK natives it's actually three steps:
"sheetrock" == drywall == Plasterboard
I'm not certain whether the water-resistant, mold-resistant variety typically hung behind tiles in bathrooms is ever referred to as "wetwall" or if they still call it "drywall".
Nor am I aware of whether anyone calls the foil-backed, glass-reinforced, fire-resistant variety "firewall" instead of "drywall".
I wouldn't be surprised if obsolete and inapplicable names still attach to items with the same function. If we ever move to polyethylene film panels sandwiched with phase-change material for our walls, it might still be called "plasterboard" somewhere.
I remember showing up on a site, and the drywall guys had just started carting in a ton of drywall. By the time we left in the afternoon, they had cut, hung, taped and mudded over 3,000 sq feet of home, it was insane.
I managed to paint my walls, but it took me much more time than expected and my flat was chaos for some weeks thereafter.
There is no problem painting for me and many others who know how to use their hand.
Is amazing when you talk to people and they are like: Did you do that? How do you know how to do that?
Learn, try and you can do anything. As people did at every step.
You can just follow all the same steps as you usually do:
1. Define the problem.
2. Determine the desired outcome.
3. Measure the existing state.
4. Note the foreseeable failure modes.
5. Plot the path from existing state to desired outcome as a series of reasonable steps, avoiding the failure modes.
6. Recursively analyze the steps, breaking them down into smaller steps if necessary.
7. Rework your plan as additional failure modes become evident.
In my experience, yes, you can do anything, as long as you ignore costs. You can't, for instance, justify buying a specialized tool to finish just one job. The hardest part is really step 2.
You must be new to DIY :)