This is exactly right. A team that crams agile sprints with tons of "tickets", makes features that aren't fully thought out (necessitating more "tickets" to fi

This is exactly right. A team that crams agile sprints with tons of "tickets", makes features that aren't fully thought out (necessitating more "tickets" to fix them), and has steady influx of general bugs cropping up is perceived to work super hard. People like to see noses to the grindstone and people stressed out. The team that works carefully and deliberately, does things well the first time, and seems to be moving at a relaxed pace is perceived to be lazy and inefficient. People are offended by this. This hit me hard the first time I was a project lead -- the customer was delighted, the product was steady and reliable, but my staff were super uncomfortable and insecure -- because the project was successful and they did their job well and like professionals, they realized that they weren't super busy. And when they aren't super busy it means they may be on the chopping block - it was terribly depressing. No amount of reassurance that, well, this is what life is like when you're good at what you do really settled anyone. So, consciously or not, we fill our time with "work theater". We work really hard to write new code that then requires more work to get right and to fix, and with a backlog of work, it looks like we're working really hard. Being always a little behind, we then make the case for more funding, more staff, more resources, etc etc etc... And the cycle continues.