Story points are pointless, measure queues

I had a terrible experience with them once. I was a relatively new, enthusiastic engineer on a struggling team of guys who'd been at the company a long time and were pretty burnt out. Inevitably I started getting all the "hard" stories with a lot of points, til it got to some stupid point where I was outputting about 80-90% of our team's combined story points. Management caught wind of it, didn't like it, so what they decided to do was adjust my points "downward" to be more in line with the rest of my team's output. It really irritated me, because it'd result in absurd situations where my teammates would get a "3 point" ticket that was like, just updating some field in a config file to an already-known value and checking it in somewhere, and I'd get this whole-ass project wrapped in a single ticket and they'd give me the same amount of points for it. And of course this was tied in to performance reviews, adding to how annoying it was.

Another super irritating thing that would happen is I'd be asked to estimate complexity on some super vaguely defined ticket describing some problem that would take a lot of detective work to even figure out how to solve, so how am I supposed to give an accurate estimate of complexity? If I knew that much, I'd already have probably fixed whatever the issue was.

Story point allocation can be useful to give a quick and easy 'good enough' estimation of time/effort required for a significant chunk of work (epic).

I find that this approximate approach is almost always more accurate than trying to estimate every little task.

If the project manager and engineers try to break down a project into small granular tasks with time estimates then it's almost inevitable that the effort will be underestimated because it's virtually impossible to anticipate every sub task, blocker, unforseen delay, etc (and then there's the extra time it takes to manage all these micro tasks in your PM system!).

In such situations the old project manager trick of doubling all estimates tends to provide a more accurate timeframe.

This is why story points can be more accurate: because you are estimating the effort it takes to do something relative to your previous experience of similar workloads.

So, if you avoid estimating granular tasks and keep your estimates as the approximate amount of effort relative to something you've done before, then you will end up with a more realistic timeframe. Story points can help with this mindset. Also your team will not have to waste time faffing around in Jira too much, or whatever system you use.

Because people (customers and managers in particular, but not just them) want to plan ahead, they can't escape the optimistic (and usually wrong) planning mode of BDUF projects. They fear uncertainty and want to know, at a glance, how long the work will take based on their current backlog/queue/whatever. Customers don't like to be told "We'll deliver when we deliver" so managers (salespeople) give an optimistic schedule now based on today's staffing (and optimistic assumptions about future staffing levels and future staff abilities).

If they'd spend 5 seconds thinking they'd realize they can produce and deliver most (but not all) systems in an incremental fashion that will satisfy the customers while leaving key decisions and estimations to be made when there's enough information to actually make them. But that takes 5 seconds and that's too damned long.

Fred sucks. We can say his work is easy, and continually make him feel bad without firing him, or we can pretend it’s two weeks.