"No, it's less effort than that"

Management has to push for lower estimates because developers have an incentive to overestimate to make life easier. The only situation where this isn't a problem is with eager junior devs, and devs that have direct skin in the game, such as at startups or a department about to be cut for being unprofitable.

>>Management has to push for lower estimates because developers have an incentive to overestimate to make life easier.

Bingo, having just left a mega-corp this is the status-quo of a lot of projects I had visibility into - take a trivial task, estimate it at 8-13 story points (i.e. the whole 2 week sprint), have nobody question the estimates, complete the story in 1-2 days and then chill for the other 8-9 days left in the sprint. It was pretty much an open secret.

...and nobody gets faulted by management, because they completed the story in the time they committed to.

On the other hand, if you had estimated the task at 3 days, and it ends up taking 5, you would get dinged for it. Estimate the same task at 13 story points, even if it was really only a 3, you were rewarded for meeting estimates - its a very perverse incentive structure.

How about getting rid of the "stories", "points" and "sprints" altogether? Not only is the nomenclature abhorrent, the best software projects don't use enterprise agile methodology.

I agree, but a lot of big companies are all in on Agile and you (as a developer) don't really get a lot of say on the matter.

Some high-paid consultants got paid a lot of money to sell it to the CEO, who then mandates it....so we are stuck with it ...until those same consultants have some other methodology-du-jour to sell.