Here are my stand up updates: I worked on the same shit as yesterday mostly, I’ll let whoever needs to know something know something. No roadblocks.
Source: I am a developer like you that has the exact same instinctual attitude about it. Here is why it's wrong.
Project managers need to build schedules so they could coordinate dependent features across multiple teams.
Marketing needs to orchestrate launch announcements and fixed activities that are not quite as inflexible as printing millions of CD-ROMs, but still require dates.
And managers, ultimately, are held responsible for a project delivery, so they need to track it's progress, understand what things are ahead (lol) or behind (yup), which areas need help from more people, more seniority, or less scope.
All of this needs to come together for any successful project of any reasonable complexity.
None of this is new, or news to you, of course. Here's the part you're missing: The way things USED to work was that PMs, Marketing, Sales, and Managers would come up with processes that worked for them, and forced it on development teams, regardless of how it made the devs feel.
Agile was an attempt for the developers to take ownership of their process bottoms-up. Planning poker, standups, sprints, all these ideas were invented by developers to make their lives EASIER not harder. And none of it was supposed to be panacea - the only way to do things. Each team is supposed to figure out the right balance of what works for them.
So don't be apathetic. You are an active contributor to this process. Take pride in the fact that you have a lot of autonomy about how to define your project structure in an agile environment. Change what you don't like, and figure out what works the best for your team.*
* Giant fucking asterix: I understand plenty of companies are extremely top-down and inflexible about "AGILE" development processes. They paid some consultants millions of dollars to define a process, and they're going to force their development teams to follow it regardless of what the front line devs want. If that is what is happening at your org, I'm sorry, that is truly unfortunate. But by and large, I find that even at companies where the devs have plenty of autonomy to define their process, they still grump about the very idea of having be forced to provide status updates or work in atomic chunks of effort and keep their software constantly releasable.
If you want to know more about the why of the standup, and what is the idea behind it, read Borland's tell: https://www.scruminc.com/origins-daily-standup/
Ever heard of a "morning sales meeting"? They've existed for decades - short, to the point, 15-20 min. No one's ever heard of scrum in sales meetings. This kind of thing exists in hundreds of other businesses as well.
Much like everything else in scrum, they are just trying to take credit for something people already did - so they can package it and sell it back to people as if it were a novel idea.
There's nothing new or special about scrum - except a reduction in productivity because of the additional overhead and meetings.
Also, it's for "our own good" and "we should own the process ourselves". While saner interpretations of AM are to be strictly verboten.
Only time I've seen such meetings not devolve into a status meeting, is when PM actively sought to cast light on potential issues and inquired about who need information, etc. This was effectively rooted out when SAFe came and eliminated PM-role entirely, while hiding discovery and decisionmaking processes, keeping them secret.
Of course, past poster child examples have nothing to do with Attention- and Selection bias either.
I can’t play this semantics game. I don’t care how you want to measure it.
Business: But now we know where the spikes come from
Gotta be smart about this devs, this ain’t rigged to your favor. Truck along, give your points and user stories, but if you want to be measured on a bullshit scale it’s at your own folly. Game it.
Planning poker is useful for exposing different interpretations of a task from the perspective of multiple developers while trying to avoid group pressure or prejudiced outcomes. Spikes are tools that allow developers to explore a problem space and gain information about whether a proposed approach to a bigger problem is feasible and how much work might be involved. And story points are there to help the development team understand how much work they are able to get through in a period of time, to help improve estimates or targets that are useful for themselves and other parts of the business.
I'm really sorry if you've had a bad time with this stuff, but none of it is unreasonable or particularly outlandish – and personally everything you've highlighted has been extremely useful to me as a developer. Like all tools they can be abused; the problem there is a broken organisation, and not a broken tool.
Most likely the new dev will lie under pressure and give a lower estimate. This is what really happens in real life. These mechanisms are so unrealistic. It’s ritual at this point.
Typically you'll either find some rats nest of complexity that the low-pointers hadn't thought about/didn't know about: result? Go with the high estimate and the low pointers learn something. Or, you'll find that the high-pointer assumed something was in-scope that isn't: result? Go with the lower estimate and tighten up the story spec with some non-goals and maybe a link to pre-existing done-work.
I've seen the version you describe, but only in dysfunctional companies. There's no helping those people but Scrum isn't the problem per se.
In the situation you describe, there are three possibilities: either the new dev makes a reasonable estimate and everybody else is wrong; the new dev is overestimating and more experienced devs are able to see that; or the new dev is not yet familiar with the point scale in use.
In the first case, great! We expose some hidden complexity in a system that might be taken for granted by the existing developers, and this helps refine an estimate for the new team structure. In the second and more likely case, we can respond by tightening up the scope and specification of a task to make it clear what is in and out of scope. And in the third, we can work to make sure the new team member gets a feel for the sizing system in use, which tends to take a little bit of time when changing team makeup.
These are not rituals and they are not unrealistic. They are specific tools aimed at solving real problems. It’s no surprise you have a bad experience if you are this aggressively dismissive of them.
Cost-benefit analysis scenario:
Request: We need to know how long it will take to build X so we can decide if we want to build it.
Response: What is the maximum amount of time to build X, such that if it took any longer, you wouldn't have us build it?
Rationale: Estimating whether a project will be over/under a time given frame is more likely to be accurate than estimating a specific span of time.
Dependencies scenario:
Request: We need to know how long it will take to build X because marketing needs to know when to start preparing.
Response: What is the amount of time marketing needs to prepare?
Rationale: Estimating that development is some amount of time away from completing is more likely to be accurate than estimating the entire project.
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Underlying most arguments for estimates from development is an unwillingness by those doing the asking to do their own estimation.
And honestly I'd rather blame numbers rather than people, the impersonality of bad numbers allows you retro without personal attacks and defensiveness, which allows more rapid improvement.
1 - their stories are likely smaller than yours.
2 - you estimate TOGETHER, in a shared common estimation system
3 - what is meant to be tracked is the total collective TEAM velocity, not the velocity of an individual team member
User stories are only a way to gather requirements for a feature and set a definition of done. They have nothing to do with productivity.
Jira seems to help stakeholders and product owners conceptualize the work and timelines but I see zero productivity gains from continuously evaluating and tweaking Jira.
Developers just want to know what they're supposed to be working on. Managerial types want to know what people are working on, when things will be done, and goodness knows what else. You obviously need to give developers the room and time to get actual development done. But at the same time, unless you work for a truly tiny company, there's always going to be some level of crap reporting that feels useless to most developers, but is important to someone else.
It's hard to strike a balance that works for everyone.
a previous team i was on used github issues with a labeling system then switched to jira when we wanted to "get serious". my est is that we had a 50% decrease in issue quality and it shifted from 50% -> 90% of issues written by PMs and managers vs ICs who had a finer grained understanding of high leverage (impact/effort) tasks. i really do blame 1) the shittyness (er... "complexity", er... "power") of the UI and 2) the strict sprint-gaming behavior it encourages. i love a strong PM/EM for directing the team towards business value, but less so for enumerating and prioritizing the micro-tactics to get there.
edit/disclaimer: i admit i'm super biased, but i've thought about this a lot working on a competitor of sorts.
Working with you might be as painful for others as working with agile is for you...
All these things (scrum, agile, etc.) are just mechanisms for working effectively as a group. Like all tools, some work better in certain situations than others, and they should be adopted deliberately with an understanding of the tradeoffs. This is traditionally where "management" falls short. It doesn't have to be this way. Accept that there are no silver bullets or always-correct methodologies, just a hodgepodge of techniques for helping people work better together.