The fluorescent lights hummed a familiar, irritating tune over the conference room table, reflecting in the glazed eyes of five engineers. It was Monday, 9:05 AM. They weren’t debugging code, or sketching architectural diagrams, or even wrestling with a particularly thorny integration. No, they were estimating story points for a sprint that hadn’t even started, for tasks that would inevitably morph beyond recognition by Wednesday afternoon. A ritual. A performance. An intricate dance of assigning arbitrary numeric values to the unknowable, all for a system that promised efficiency but often delivered little more than administrative busywork.
One of them, a principal engineer named Mark, ran a hand over his thinning hair, suggesting “Maybe 35 points for the refactor?” His voice lacked conviction. He knew, as they all did, that the true effort wouldn’t be in the initial coding, but in the unforeseen complexities, the legacy systems that whispered secrets only after 45 hours of digging, the edge cases that emerged from the digital shadows. But “35 points” sounded decisive. It looked good on the Jira dashboard. It fed the beast.
We have, collectively, optimized everything around the actual work. We’ve honed our planning methodologies, our tracking tools, our reporting dashboards to a gleaming, frictionless sheen. We’ve meticulously documented every process, every dependency, every conceivable risk. Yet, amidst this frenetic meta-work, the quiet, sometimes messy, often non-linear reality of creation, of doing, of deep thought, is being slowly,
