This is partially why everyone hates managers.

What the hell else are you even doing that you don’t have time to ensure your employees are doing their job? You’re really not that busy.

> Continuously monitoring workers to make sure they are "delivering" is too hard

Wow. That's...astounding. If you're such a poor manager that....managing...is too hard. Perhaps you should go back to IC work.

Employees don't have to be continuously monitored to see if they're doing work, that's how you wind up with spyware and butts in seats mentality. Are they checking in their work? Are they completing their stories on time? Are they getting near the average number of story points done in a sprint? If so, leave them the fuck alone.

An environment where your productivity is measured by the amount of code you check in and the number of story points you complete is exactly the "work environment that drives other workers away" analog31 mentioned. Many ICs (and frankly most of the best ones) consider this to be micromanagement.

I'm sorry, why should measuring story points be considered micromanagement?

Story points are supposed to be a proxy for amount of work required, seems reasonable to track that. It's not like I'm saying you should be measured by the lines of code you add or something arbitrary.

Often a task ends up requiring much more work than expected, or some more important task displaces sprint work, or you need to do something like prototyping or design work or customer consultation which can't be expressed well in terms of concrete deliverables. An environment where your boss is going to call you to account for only getting 2 points done last sprint when you were supposed to do 10 creates nasty incentives to avoid these things in favor of small easily-defined tasks.

Story points are fundamentally arbitrary to begin with. If you're doing development work that needs research and problem solving instead of just cranking out boilerplate for some standard type of application you've built 100 times before then often you can't even give a reasonable estimate for new work in terms of story points until you've already done most of it. That's the nature of creative and exploratory work.

So yes the kind of process that plans everything in two week sprints and tracks tasks lasting maybe just a few hours each via daily meetings is micromanagement. That's what it's called when managers are so incapable of setting a clear direction and then trusting their people to get the job done that they have to check up on progress several times every day and constantly meddle with the real work.

Generally the team agrees on the points of the tasks together. Investigative/research work is also pointed/estimated.

It's mostly for planning, though.

Amazon and UPS know the output because it's an easily measurable menial task.

You won't be able to do that for knowledge work, and you'll end up using proxies like butt-in-chair time or jira-tickets-closed which are easy to game and push away the actually competent workers that have outside options.

Just do your job as a manager.

Interesting, thanks