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Comment by DandyDev | Hacker News Reader

Let’s be honest. Your boss asked a reasonable question and your answer could have been something like “I need a day to familiarize myself with the code so I can give a rough but reasonable estimate. Also, I apologize I and the team fucked up by not sharing knowledge properly with each other and letting knowledge islands emerge”

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You are very good at this. Without even knowing what the code is about you are able to discern that it would take me about a day to get to sufficient familiarity. Meanwhile I, who have been working on the project for twelve years and wrote most of it, still don't know. Are you available as a mentor?

So you worked for twelve years on that code base and you still don’t know how to estimate a bug fix? There seem to be other problems then.

And you are right, I don’t know anything about that code base, certainly not enough to know if estimates should be easy or not. But the fact that they aren’t is a sign of problems either way.

And I stand by my point that your boss’ question is reasonable, and the team should do some introspection to learn why such a fair question cannot be easily answered

I have seen bugs, in this project and several others, that range from actually "actually a feature" to both serious and unsolvable. Most of them are somewhere in the middle. But before knowing anything about the code or the bug, I can't tell where this task will land on that distribution. If you coerce an estimate out of me all I can do is guess the median value, which you can fill in without my help, while I go and work on the bug. Asking me for a number before I know anything about it is a waste of both of our time.

Why would you say the question is reasonable?

To me, it is not a reasonable question because there are so many assumptions smuggled in with it.

What assumptions are part of the entirely reasonable question “how long would it take to fix this bug?”

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