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Comment by lwigo | Hacker News Reader

I have worked more (and harder, quantifiable by sprint points if you must have a number) in the past year from home than in the entire rest of my career combined. My close ones tell me I'm just making "the man" more money, but I really don't mind it for some reason. I feel like I'm accomplishing goals and feel fulfilled in ways that I didn't previously. No signs of burnout, perhaps I am a freak of nature.

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> I have worked more (and harder, quantifiable by sprint points if you must have a number) in the past year from home than in the entire rest of my career combined.

To be clear: out of all the sprint points you've ever completed, more than 50% of them were completed in the past 12 months? How long has your career been?

(Please don't hear this as a criticism of your point - I'm just not very experienced with scrum.)

To what extent are sprint points a good measure of productivity or of effort? My understanding is that they're based on estimates, which seem like a moving target to me depending on the experience and motivations of the estimator.

They are a moving target, but my org has them pretty closely pinned to 2hrs of "work time" per point, at least ideologically. When you see that go from 12-18ish in person per person to 30+ (~38 average consistently for me), it's pretty straightforward that the org is actually getting closer to its billable 80 hours per sprint, even with 3ish daily Zoom meetings. And to boot, the quality of design, PMing, ticket writing, feature scoping, and everything else around it has increased, which probably helps the productivity.

> my org has them pretty closely pinned to 2hrs of "work time" per point

Off-topic, but isn't this exactly what you're not supposed to do with points? AIUI, they're explicitly disconnected from time so that teams can adjust points to match their reality.

Explicitly, yes. Implicitly, no.

Your experience with remote work is not at all unique. And if your team would like to move onto something a bit more accommodating of higher productivity and remote work than their are new tools available also.

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