But that's kind of the point isn't it: project management, and especially agile, is about making work predictable. There's an undeniable business logic to this that I wouldn't refute.
Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable. You can't reign it into story points or whatever. There's too many false starts, or sudden insights. It certainly takes process and discipline, but not necessarily the kind that can be measured and reported.
That's probably fine for most business, because your inventory control program doesn't need any individual brilliance; but I think it can be frustrating for really good programmers because they do want to create a work of greatness.
Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable.
Actually, most great artists work with a lot of constraints. There are many great realist painters who accept the constraint of realistically representing the world. Any programmer works with the constraints of the machine.
And working in the constraints of project management and multiple-person provides plenty of room for creativity I would say. Yes, you have the constraint of the code working and you have the constraint of the code being understandable. You might even have the constraint of telling the other programmers how to do the difficult thing you can do and they can't. Greatness is possible there given that greatness is possible with code that compiles as opposed to code which is merely unpredictable.
And project managers are always happy to have people finish faster than expected.
Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable. You can't reign it into story points or whatever. There's too many false starts, or sudden insights. It certainly takes process and discipline, but not necessarily the kind that can be measured and reported.
That's probably fine for most business, because your inventory control program doesn't need any individual brilliance; but I think it can be frustrating for really good programmers because they do want to create a work of greatness.