Businesses are paying market rate salaries to employees who generate them revenue. If anything engineers should be the ones questioning the exorbitant compensation and perks at the top of the org structure.

> why shouldn't they have visibility into what's being done?

Because they shouldn't be micromanaging. They should be setting high level goals and expectations and giving teams autonomy and trust. Intrusive surveillance and low level metrics create perverse incentives that detract from those high level goals.

Engineering is one of the only professions that is paid commensurate to the value they provide

Calling our salaries 'exorbitant' leaves you without superlatives left to describe executives that get paid thousands of times our wage, and at least they do work compared to the owners of capital who are 'paid' incredible money without doing any work at all.

To call an engineer salary 'exorbitant' you must be comparing it to the salary of people who function as modern serfs, and are not paid commensurate with the value they provide, or even enough to live a safe and satisfied life. Being paid enough for modest freedom and security is not 'exorbitant' though- no matter what you're comparing it to.

I can only say that IME a team is going to be a lot more productive if they are able to own their development process. Good infrastructure, knowledgeable engineers, healthy relationships instead of competitive ones - that's what creates a highly productive team and highly productive engineers.

The challenge is that management is only looking through a small window and everything from promotions to raises to favours are dished out based on that window.

Anything not in view of that window immediately obviously becomes useless to one's advancement in a company, so the window better cover everything which matters and it usually doesn't.

The question of whom things are visible to is an important one. Your comment says "management", and yeah that's one common way of thinking about it. But managers are just individuals with their own motivations. It is really "the business" that wants visibility in order to best accomplish its goals. There is an assumption that "management" is better aligned with "the business" than the employees they are paying "exorbitant" salaries to. But that may or may not be true, managers are also just individuals with their own motivations. So to the extent that it is true that managers are better aligned with the business, why is that the case? I see a few things that trend in that direction: compensation that is more tied to the performance of the business (through bonuses or what have you), more visibility into the goals and reasoning for decisions being made by leadership, and a better grounding in the dynamics of the business (what is the strategy, how does its market work, how does it make money). The theory is that because of those things (and probably others I'm not thinking of), the managers are better suited to be representing the interests of the business, whereas the engineers are just tools those managers can use to further those interests.

That is one way of doing it, probably the most common way, and it definitely seems like management visibility into work is extremely important in such a setup. But another way might be to align the engineers with the business in the same way managers are: pay bonuses based on the performance of the business, give them visibility into goals and decisions, teach them about the strategy of the business and the dynamics of how it makes money. That is, give the engineers ownership in the same way management has ownership, and trust them to make decisions that are in the interest of the business.

To put this another way: if you trust managers to make decisions about trade-offs that are in the best interest of the business, why can't you trust engineers as well? Are the engineers dumber or shiftier than the managers such that they can't be trusted with this?

As far as business deserves to know what they are paying for, that is absolutely correct as well.

The problem is that business is not paying for story points. They are paying for actual product and delivery. So when they measure output by story points, you end up with a situation where teams are trying to maximize story points delivery, etc. as opposed to actual product delivery.

Having working software is line two of the Manifesto. They can run it each week and see whats new.

Even better, they can provide feedback on the working software and the team can then quickly respond to that feedback. In a week or two, when the outsider next looks at the working software they will see the software improved.

The devil is in the details and in this case literally because the granularity of progress is too fine-grained to be exposed away from its context. The project manager or whatever you call the nearest person with power over your time needs some leeway to organize, ask for some extra, compensate, forgive, and reward you, without higher powers micromanaging. Freedom is the premise of responsability.

Absolute evil happens when customer demands access to hourly activity log for each developer in the (not on premises) project.

Most often it is not. The problem is that management does not understand shit about software. And they usually don't care to learn about it. Hence this is about as effective as me asking for transparency regarding a COVID-19 vaccine. Yes, the practitioners could tell me they are in a phase-II trial. But to process that information fully and put it into context, I'd effectively need to study medicine.