One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I'd need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.

And that's how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn't he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn't be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.

The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team's velocity is meaningful.

Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.

Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.

Sources:

• Story Points Don't Work
• No Estimates - An Introduction