I think the problem is that in your average job, the company is paying you for your time, not your productivity. I mean they should be paying you for your produ

I think the problem is that in your average job, the company is paying you for your time, not your productivity. I mean they should be paying you for your productivity, but that's pretty hard to measure and easy to game. I think it does have an unfortunate cooling effect though, in that, if they're paying you for your time there's no particular reason to put in extra effort to do things faster or better (other than personal pride and the nebulous possibility of a raise somewhere down the line). There's been times I've gotten my entire sprint done in a couple days, only to get rewarded with... more stuff to do. That's not a criticism, I mean, that's the employment agreement I signed up for, I'm expected to do stuff 5 days a week, but I imagine that if I could get a sprint done in 3 days and then take 2 days off, I would be more motivated to get that stuff done quickly, and then QA would have more time to test it, and so on.