The coffee is cold. The server fan whirs its monotonous C-sharp drone from the corner of my home office. On the screen, 14 faces in tiny boxes stare into the middle distance, and one face, the manager’s, is talking.

“Okay, so for ticket JIRA-444, you said you’re about 80% done. That’s great. Can you just do me a favor and break down the remaining 20% into sub-tasks on the board? Just so we have full visibility.”

My mouth says, “Sure, no problem.” My brain is screaming. Ticket JIRA-444 is changing the hex code of a button from a slightly-off-brand blue to the officially-sanctioned-by-marketing blue. The remaining 20% is pushing the commit and waiting for the build to pass. It is not a task. It is not even a series of actions. It is a state of waiting. But I will go to the board, and I will create two sub-tasks: ‘Push final commit’ and ‘Monitor deployment pipeline.’ And then I will immediately mark them both as ‘Done.’ This is my job now. I am a professional box-ticker.

I’m going to make a confession that will probably get my developer card revoked: I used to defend this stuff. Vehemently. A few years ago, I was the guy saying, “You’re just not doing it right.” I’d read the manifesto, I’d internalized the 12 principles. I believed in its soul. It felt like trying to explain cryptocurrency to my parents; the core idea is revolutionary, but the conversation always gets stuck on transaction fees and how you can lose your digital wallet. The nuance is the first casualty. With Agile, the principles of ‘trusting individuals’ and ‘sustainable pace’ were immediately sacrificed for the much more manager-friendly concepts of ‘daily stand-ups’ and ‘story points.’ They took the parts they could measure and threw the rest away.

The Turning Point

My turning point was a project I was leading. The pressure from above was immense, coming down in metrics that ended in 4 and reports due every 4 hours. I, in my infinite wisdom, translated that pressure directly onto my team. I insisted on granular tasks for everything. A four-hour research spike had to be broken into four one-hour sub-tasks. I told myself it was for ‘clarity.’ I told myself it was to ‘protect the team’ by showing how much work was really happening. What a lie. I was just afraid. I was afraid of looking like I didn’t have control. In my attempt to ‘be agile,’ I became the very micromanager I despised. My best engineer, a quiet guy who produced brilliant work in unpredictable bursts, pulled me aside after two weeks. He didn’t even sound angry. He just sounded tired.

I was just a gear in a much bigger machine of institutional distrust.

This obsession with total visibility is pathological. It’s the belief that if you can see every tiny moving part, you can control the outcome. But creative work, the kind of work that actually solves problems, doesn’t happen in tiny, predictable, observable increments. It happens in flashes of insight after hours of staring at a problem. It happens in the shower. It happens on a walk. It is messy and nonlinear and fundamentally resistant to being broken down into 4-point tickets.

The desire to see everything is the desire to kill the magic.

I once had a fascinating lunch with a man named Finley C.M., a retired union negotiator who had spent 44 years representing factory workers. I was complaining about this very problem, and he just smiled. “You think this is new?” he asked. He told me about time-and-motion studies from decades ago, where managers with stopwatches would track every single physical movement a worker made, all in the name of efficiency.

Agile, in its worst form, is just the digital stopwatch. JIRA is the clipboard.

This modern workplace obsession wants a live feed of your brain’s activity streamed directly to a dashboard. In a physical office, this surveillance might look like a manager constantly pacing the floor. In a remote or hybrid environment, it’s the digital leash of status updates and ticket-tracking. When it comes to securing a physical space, you’d strategically place a poe camera to monitor an entrance or a vulnerable area; it’s about security, about accountability for a specific, important zone. You would not, however, point it directly at an employee’s screen all day to ensure they are typing. One action is about securing an asset; the other is about a fundamental lack of trust in the person. Corporate agile has confused asset protection with people policing.

The Quiet Rebellion

So I’ll criticize the system, and yet, here I am, still moving my tickets across the board. That’s the contradiction, isn’t it? We participate in the systems we know are broken because we have to. But recognizing the absurdity is the first step. It allows you to play the game without letting it consume your soul. You create the sub-tasks for the button color change not because you believe in their value, but because it is the cost of admission-a small, bureaucratic tax you pay to be left alone long enough to do the actual work. You learn to give the illusion of control while carving out a small pocket of autonomy where real creativity can happen.