"No, it's less effort than that"

I get the point, and with irresponsible parties (as is fairly widespread in most companies) there's a real risk here.

However the analogy of a meteorologist seems poor as that job is focused on predicting the weather - the typical dev is focused on operating in that weather and comparatively inexperienced in predicting with great accuracy.

What's frustrating as a stakeholder is ludicrous estimates, which don't even start with the work time, let alone end up with a realistic duration. This is particularly true (and frustrating) at the micro task level, an area I'm often requiring items that take at most 30 minute to complete and are usually things I could do in less time if only I had access... You get a weeks long estimate back, even when it's incurring a serious cost in production and falls in the drop everything category (which obviously one wants to avoid but does come up). I get that none of those 30 minute tasks will take 30 minute alone as there's testing and documentation to add but the more bs level the estimate, the more it damages the trust relationship.

> 30 minute to complete and are usually things I could do in less time

Why don't you? Surely there are ways of granting the required access in your organization?

If the answer is something akin to "not my job", then you have an organization that values intercommunicating pieces each with strict responsibilities. It should be expected that communication completely dominates output performance.

If properly tuned, such organizations can achieve good quality, and if the duties are well specified, also great throughput. But they will never have low latency, as turnaround time is sacrificed for other tings.

The example of a week long estimation for a trivial task is pretty much expected then. In a fully booked schedule, any new task is not likely to be scheduled for weeks. If that task then requires the attention of more than one person, because of the above fine grained responsibilities, those turnaround times really start to add up.

If that's not a good fit for the job at hand, the organization is just not suited for the task.