I am the only developer for a nationwide company. Everyone else in this company has no idea about IT, from the owner down.

I have about a year of actual IT experience, so God knows how I got this role.

Fellow developers, especially .NET developers, how do you estimate the time required to complete tasks set by none technical people?

What you think is right *2.

I break the task down into steps until I get in a range of typically 1-5 days, then add up and allocate 20-50% buffer, depending on how familiar I am with whatever has to be done.

When I have no precise idea, like when it's about bugs, it depends on how fucked up the bug is. Something easy like a business logic bug should take a day or two, something difficult like fixing a protocol stack or a race condition two weeks.

Sometimes I don't even have an idea what it is about, then I request investigation time. That will be a compromise of what I think I need and what the customer will accept. I just fill in to-do items to make my time request plausible.

But yeah, estimation is really difficult initially, I remember that from back then when I was a fresher.

@dotFuck for me its:

actualTime = whateverIThink × 2.5 + x
Where x is extra time to solve bugs and make things more readable for others

I guess you can't overestimate, so make it as ridiculous as possible while still being accepted by your boss or clients.

If your task depends on other people give them a deadline that is much earlier!

Pi is a nice constant to multiply by.
Tends to lead to overestimations for me, though, so I usually go with just doubling my initial estimate. I still use Pi when needing to wait on QA or other devs because they always take forever or let me down.

“it will take as long as it must to do it correctly”

@ryangurn "We will then pay you as much as we think we can afford" would be a valid answer.

Tell them whatever the hell you want, do the job faster, earn reputation. (And eventually a raise)

@dotFuck and if it still seems right multiply that by 2 again