In spite of an advanced degree and decades of experience, the best job I can find is one that pays well, but micromanages this way via the tyranny of JIRA – I spend an hour every week haggling over story points for the coming week and snivellingly excuse my “score” for the previous week. The funny thing about this is that it’s actually a lose-lose. I’m not motivated to work harder and produce better (or even faster) results: I’m actually motivated to exploit the system as best I can rather than just do actual good work. No matter how much they complain about my velocity, I’m hard (not impossible, but hard) to replace: I’m careful to manufacture some job security that way because I don’t have any choice. My boss is actually one of the better ones: he realizes that reality is more complicated than a JIRA report, so he overlooks a bit of gaming of the system so that our reports look good even though we’re actually doing work that advances the organization. I’ve worked, though, under mindless drones that took those reports completely seriously. The end result was somewhere between union (that’s not my job) and prison mentality, and you can see the results in the finished product.
This is such a great concept. It is a win-win scenario. The employee wins a better place to work, motivation and fun. And the employer gets loyalty, productivity, commitment and a better performance.