I wasn't exactly suggesting that everyone work as contractors with a pre-negotiated contract. I was more motioning toward the idea of "sprints" as being a simi

I wasn't exactly suggesting that everyone work as contractors with a pre-negotiated contract. I was more motioning toward the idea of "sprints" as being a similar thing to "milestones" — i.e. that the product of one or two weeks of labor at expected levels of productivity are "the contractual output", and that beyond that, the process by which an employee produces "the contractual output" is a black box which the Firm should not tamper with. Each "sprint" is not exactly a negotiation, because the person defining the sprints should be someone on the knowledge-worker's "side", protecting them from Firm over-exploitation with the goal of ensuring their long-term productivity. As it happens, this is the original idea behind Extreme Programming — with an engineering manager presenting an API to the Firm where the Firm can push Tasks to be worked on, and then the Tasks will get broken up + rearranged + scheduled into Sprints, and from there allocated onto a set of knowledge-workers; and where the Firm can't know or control anything more about that "thread pool" of knowledge-workers, other than 1. knowing who is part of it, and 2. examining its aggregate output at the end of the sprint.