Sounds like your teams were underestimating task effort.
>>If you have a PM that doesn't allow time for such things, it can be rough.
Anything's rough with a shitty PM, which is what you've described.
Management get addicted to getting more story points, and any push back from developers that would lower the number in the short term is ignored. Seriously, I've seen "average story points per developer per sprint" reported to 2 decimal places as if it's a meaningful number.
Agile does not. Even a number of the defined methodologies sold as "Agile" do not (Scrum, for instance, does not mention either user stories or story points -- it does indicate that backlog items will have estimates that are less-specific when the item is farther out in the tail of the work queue and more refined when it is near the head of the queue, but doesn't specify the terms in which those estimates should be gathered.)
> Seriously, I've seen "average story points per developer per sprint" reported to 2 decimal places as if it's a meaningful number.
If it is fairly stable (which should also be measured if it is going to be used), it is a meaningful number for planning what items are within capacity for a sprint. It may not be meaningful for other purposes even then.
Ok, explain this to me. Why is this not a meaningful number?
Story points are essentially hours and generally in the shops I worked in, they are converted to hours. If something takes longer, the hours are adjusted.
So really, that's a metric for maximum hours worked ... why is that not a good metric?
If someone is on a remote team and they're expected to work 40 hours a week, why is measuring the maximum hours they were on the job a bad metric?
I'd think by and large you would evalute remote workers by theit work output, not by estimating how much time they've spent.
Which is what? Lines of code? I think that's even worse.
How do you determine how much work to assign someone if estimates are meaningless? How do you determine if someone is productive or is doing one hour's work per week?
Aside from insults, I don't really see any answers. Have you ever been in a PM role?
Again, if you adjust estimates as you're doing the work ... as in, it's more complex than you thought, so you adjust the estimate ... why are estimates a bad metric and what metric (something that can be quantified) would you recommend?
I never said that estimates were meaningless, but they are tools for planning with high intrinsic uncertainty, and translating that uncertainty to evaluations gives unfairness. People are very sensitive to (perceived) unfairness and the idea that they will be treated so will give rise to resentment, not to mention incentives to game the system and overestimate. Hence endless bickering about points.
If agile failed for any reason it was misunderstanding human psychology.
Personally I don't think human performance in creative professions is well suited to quantified analysis, especially when team efforts are involved. So I don't really have an answer there.
But yes, it's a people problem.