alt Hacker NewsI just find it so oversimplified that I can't believe you're sincere. Like you have entirely no internal heuristic for even a coarse estimation of a few minutes, hours, or days? I would say you're not being very introspective or are just exaggerating.
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I can explain it to you. A bug description at the beginning is some observed behaviour that seems to be wrong. Now the process starts of UNDERSTANDING the bug. Once that process has concluded, it will be possible to make a rough guess of how long fixing it will take. Very often, the answer then is a minute or two, unless major rewrites are necessary. So, the problem is you cannot put an upfront bound on how long you need to understand the bug. Understanding can be a long winded process that includes trying to fix the bug in the process.
My team once encountered a bug that was due to a supplier misstating the delay timing needed for a memory chip.
The timings we had in place worked, for most chips, but they failed for a small % of chips in the field. The failure was always exactly identical, the same memory address for corrupted, so it looked exactly like an invalid pointer access.
It took multiple engineers months of investigating to finally track down the root cause.
It rather depends on the environment in which you are working - if estimates are well estimates then there is probably little harm in guessing how long something might take to fix. However, some places treat "estimates" as binding commitments and then it could be risky to make any kind of guess because someone will hold you to it.
I think it's very sector dependent.
Working on drivers, a relatively recent example is when we started looking at a "small" image corruption issue in some really specific cases, that slowly spidered out to what was fundamentally a hardware bug affecting an entire class of possible situations, it was just this one case happened to be noticed first.
There was even talk about a hardware ECO at points during this, though an acceptable workaround was eventually found.
I could never have predicted that when I started working on it, and it seemed every time we thought we'd got a decent idea about what was happening even more was revealed.
And then there's been many other issues when you fall onto the cause pretty much instantly and a trivial fix can be completed and in testing faster than updating the bugtracker with an estimate.
True there's probably a decent amount, maybe even 50%, where you can probably have a decent guess after putting in some length of time and be correct within a factor of 2 or so, but I always felt the "long tail" was large enough to make that pretty damn inaccurate.