Not having good definitions of done is also a great way for a team to feel like it's treading water eternally. Small, achievable goals are a hack for team morale. (The trick is making sure that the small, achievable goals roll up into valuable long-term work.)
The (very real) problems the author cites are problems with management, not story points. "Pressuring or coercing... Immediately discounting... Comparing and judging..." It doesn't matter what project management tool/technique is the object of these actions; the actions themselves are the problem.
I hesitate to play the "you're just using them wrong/misunderstanding them" card, but it's worth at least alluding to its existence. Like any other tool, story points are powerful and helpful in the hands of people who want to and know how to use them to improve things, and difficult or even destructive otherwise.
That sounds wildly micro-managey. I often don't know how long something is going to take until I dig into it; sometimes I don't know how long something is going to take until I'm almost done. The ambiguity/fuzziness of points is a feature, not a bug.
If I'm going to be "held to account" based on my estimates, I will optimize for producing work that matches my (naive, uninformed, up-front) estimate, rather than producing the _right_ work. This will last for a few months, at which point I will realize I'm burned out, working inefficiently, and writing bad code, and I'll find a new job on a different team that doesn't treat its employees like train conductors.
True.
But on the other hand an experienced developer usually can give a reasonable estimate. An if he says: "about two days maybe a week" then that is you best estimate. Using story points is just another complication.
And points do not stop anyone from holding you to account, if that is what they want to do.
Killing over 1 million Iraqis, most of them civilians, counts as a "win"?
The war massively damaged the US government's credibility, both domestically and internationally, cost the US ~$2T, and did little to stabilize the region; one might be able to argue that it destabilized it, in fact. The US won a military victory in Iraq, but emerged worse off on the whole as a result.
If wars have either winners, losers, or ties, the Iraqis definitely were the "losers" of the invasion of Iraq by the US. This isn't intended to be a moral value judgement on the slaughter of the 1 million Iraqis in the process.
