the worst part for me, was not only being unable to estimate the time to solve the bug, i found that often the problem was in syntax or shadings of understanding on how functions or bracket syntax worked. i could refer to all the biggest programming books off the shelves, and the answers they provided would not work. Programming is one of those professions where answers lay with people who had busted their brains or lucked it trying to make it work, and had collected over many years, snippets of code which they knew worked. If you weren't chummy with these people, you would never find the answer. This isn't really a worthwhile profession. Unlike physics, or maths, where there is an independent answer governed by forces outside of an individual human, programming is a profession which inherently depends on learning errors from another human. It's a pointless profession and gets you nowhere in life at the end. Sadly. (Unlike say law, or accounting or physics, where at old age, you know more about the world around you.)