It's more like my managers and product management radically overestimate the amount of time things take. Those are the people choosing how much work they think I should be able to accomplish each sprint and I don't do anything to dissuade them from the idea that that seems about right to me as well. I'm frequently praised by my manager and kidded by my colleagues about how "fast" I've managed to knock out my stories even when only working a few hours the first day of the sprint and submitting my PRs the day before or of the sprint ending. Those same managers/product managers work with many other engineers at my company so I don't know if everyone at my company is underachieving stealthily or what. As I said in my original post, I'm honestly as really, really confused as anyone else about what's going on, but since I'm praised in performance reviews, given a decent bonus, been 2x chosen for quarterly awards and promoted internally, etc, I mean, what should I do ? Demand more work ? Yeah, no thanks.