How to Point Stories

I got the last place I worked at that insisted on doing that poker BS to stop by performing magic tricks with the cards.

Magically turning 3-pt cards into 8-pt tasks made everyone...uncomfortable.

I tried this nonsense in multiple places - never worked, not even once, for anything over three points.

Best part of it is how it represents the disconnection between management, engineering, and agile coaches.

Agile coaches would tell you that story points do not represent time, but complexity, and that they are not absolute, so different teams may assign different values to similar tasks.

Engineering takes that, and scores tasks based on perceived complexity, sort of. Junior devs start by underestimating, then they overestimate. Senior devs do the opposite. Again, anything over three points either gets done too quick, or lingers for over a week.

Management, obviously, keeps looking at these estimates in terms of time. They don't care about points the slightest.

At one of the companies I worked at, we started by using planning poker. Ended using a dice as a joke.