Why the philosophy of the modern programmer is like a pistachio nut

"... estimating software engineering projects is like predicting the weather"

That is a good point. Weather can be estimated. But that is expensive. Yet it is not too expensive because it benefits so many people. Whereas estimating a single software project's effort and time needed does not benefit more than a few managers. Therefore we don't usually do serious estimates, or pay lip-service to them.