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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?

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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.

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