It's still a ridiculous waste of time. It makes work about gaming the system and your boss (is it better to underestimate so he lets you do what you want, or overestimate so you don't get yelled at later?) rather than moving forward and getting shit done. It's inane, stupid stuff designed to make unimportant people feel important.
A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place.
It makes work about gaming the system if you work with a shitty manager. I don't. It is just for the managers to have a reasonable estimate of how the project is doing.
I personally would not want a builder to home build a home with my money without a time and cost estimate. This is not about startups or established companies. If you don;t know what needs to happen for your vision to come to fruition and how much it is going to cost then you are leaving a lot chance.
I just don't get why people are always complaining about estimates.
Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more.
If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time.
Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required.
Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc.
Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense.
I think your point lends itself more to a general misunderstanding of the purpose of planning and estimation rather a lack of value in the process.
There is a reason it is called a plan and an estimate instead of a fact-sheet and a contract.
I am in a position now where I provide architectural review and software delivery estimation on a full time basis. If we did not provided these estimates the VPs and directors would not have any way of justifying where and when to spend the investors' money to achieve the best return for the company.
IMO, spending someone else's money (read investment) without a plan and estimate should be considered irresponsible.
A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place.