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I agree with most of it minus the "Don't make esitmates" part. Without making some sort of estimate things just don't work.

I guess maybe it could work assuming you fully control a single product. Everywhere I have worked we need the estimates simply for coordination of all the moving parts.

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I think by estimates they might mean deadlines. It’s well worth asking, as an engineer several questions like: “How complicated is this? What are all the moving parts? Whose going to need to be involved to get this out the door?”

But it’s counter productive sometimes to say “ I think feature X will be completed by Y” and then that estimate turns into a deadline.

Maybe you could rephrase it to "Don't make estimates before work is well underway". The main problem with estimates is that they are usually just wild guesses and pretty useless. But once you've got going on something, have had time to think it through and test your ideas, you can usually give at least a very rough estimate at that point.

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