Story points are a useful exercise when trying to discuss complexity of a task but IME it completely falls apart when used as a metric to determine anything useful like velocity.
I had a terrible experience with them once. I was a relatively new, enthusiastic engineer on a struggling team of guys who'd been at the company a long time and were pretty burnt out. Inevitably I started getting all the "hard" stories with a lot of points, til it got to some stupid point where I was outputting about 80-90% of our team's combined story points. Management caught wind of it, didn't like it, so what they decided to do was adjust my points "downward" to be more in line with the rest of my team's output. It really irritated me, because it'd result in absurd situations where my teammates would get a "3 point" ticket that was like, just updating some field in a config file to an already-known value and checking it in somewhere, and I'd get this whole-ass project wrapped in a single ticket and they'd give me the same amount of points for it. And of course this was tied in to performance reviews, adding to how annoying it was.
Another super irritating thing that would happen is I'd be asked to estimate complexity on some super vaguely defined ticket describing some problem that would take a lot of detective work to even figure out how to solve, so how am I supposed to give an accurate estimate of complexity? If I knew that much, I'd already have probably fixed whatever the issue was.
I had a terrible experience with them once. I was a relatively new, enthusiastic engineer on a struggling team of guys who'd been at the company a long time and were pretty burnt out. Inevitably I started getting all the "hard" stories with a lot of points, til it got to some stupid point where I was outputting about 80-90% of our team's combined story points. Management caught wind of it, didn't like it, so what they decided to do was adjust my points "downward" to be more in line with the rest of my team's output. It really irritated me, because it'd result in absurd situations where my teammates would get a "3 point" ticket that was like, just updating some field in a config file to an already-known value and checking it in somewhere, and I'd get this whole-ass project wrapped in a single ticket and they'd give me the same amount of points for it. And of course this was tied in to performance reviews, adding to how annoying it was.
Another super irritating thing that would happen is I'd be asked to estimate complexity on some super vaguely defined ticket describing some problem that would take a lot of detective work to even figure out how to solve, so how am I supposed to give an accurate estimate of complexity? If I knew that much, I'd already have probably fixed whatever the issue was.