Being asked "how long will it take?" is actually my greatest fear in tech work. Give me long enough and I'm (fairly) confident I can overcome any other problem,

Being asked "how long will it take?" is actually my greatest fear in tech work. Give me long enough and I'm (fairly) confident I can overcome any other problem, but estimating time, even for seemingly trivial things… <gulp> I'll probably give everyone an upvote here as a) it's nice to see I'm not alone, and b) there's some really good tips. Not sure why every tech interview introduces a whiteboard with an algorithm problem when all they have to do is ask me "how long will this simple command line client take to build" to really see the difference between the way I attack a difficult problem!