Hogwash. Has this person never run a business, or interacted with those who have? The business depends on estimates in order to quantitatively determine how much time, money, and resources to allocate to a project. Teams in the manufacturing and construction fields deliver estimates all the time. Why shouldn't IT people be held to the same standard?
If you can't estimate, it's generally because your process isn't comprehensive enough. Tim Bryce said it's very straightforward, once you account for all the variables, including your bill of materials (what goes into the product), and the skill level and effectiveness rating (measured as the ratio of direct work to total time on the job) of the personnel involved. (You are tracking these things, aren't you?)
https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/I...
> The pro-estimation dogma says that these questions ought to be answered during the planning process, so that each individual piece of work being discussed is scoped small enough to be accurately estimated. I’m not impressed by this answer. It seems to me to be a throwback to the bad old days of software architecture, where one architect would map everything out in advance, so that individual programmers simply had to mechanically follow instructions.
If you're not dividing the work such that about ~60% of the time is spent in analysis and design and only ~15% in programming, you've got your priorities backwards. In the "bad old days", systems got delivered on time and under budget, and they shipped in working order, rather than frustrating users with a series of broken or half-working systems. This is because PRIDE, the scientific approach to systems analysis and design, was the standard. It still is in places like Japan. Not so much America, where a lot of software gets produced it's true, but very little of it is any good.