Honest question, if you work in an agile environment, do you prefer story points or counting of hours to gauge tasks?

I preferred hours. Easier for me

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Story points are good for when you have business people involved who want to use your estimates as a stick to beat you with.

Saying that, instead of "you said it would he 3 hours and it took 5", we did get "you said it would be 3 story points and I equate that to be about 2 days, and it took 3!" which can be equally annoying.

Interesting hack we found that stopped that from happening: we changed the labels on the Fibonacci numbers to text, and started estimating it with text.

We knew that "Very small" meant 1 story point and "medium" meant 5 etc but the boss didn't, so we could still estimate just as easy, but it suddenly made it really difficult for that boss to start adding things up and comparing things.

We use story points and that actually works quite well.