> Sometimes, the right answer to "How long will this take?" is "It will take this long to get an answer to that question." Yep, or sometimes "no idea, let me w

> Sometimes, the right answer to "How long will this take?" is "It will take this long to get an answer to that question." Yep, or sometimes "no idea, let me work on it for a day and get back to you". You can't expect an estimate for something with many unknowns to be very accurate so best to reduce the unknowns first. Real world projects have too many factors out of your control as well (e.g. decision making and schedules of stakeholders, combinations of software/people/requirements you've never worked with before, evolving requirements) so this idea that you can guess the total number of hours with high accuracy as you get more experienced doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Fixed price projects are also a way of saying "we genuinely don't know how long it's going to take, but we'll take on that risk instead of you".