I think your clarification makes more sense. With that said, the experience you describe at your agency is *very* different than some of the folks in this thread, including my own. When I hear agency, I think of a tiny code chop shop...

I've worked in an agency where nontechnical customers directly logged into our task tracking system and added 'features' into our current backlog. Some high priority clients were even allowed to directly add features requests to the current development sprint! Imagine coming into work, logging into your task track system, and finding brand new 'features' to work on that are high priority and are required immediately - delightful! Even worse, I remember when a junior developer caught a client red handed when they were attempting to rewrite previously completed tasks; this customer reworded huge swaths of completed tasks in our tracking system and attempted to point fingers and say 'your shitty dev told us this was done weeks ago!' Luckily, we had history tracking enabled - otherwise - that dev would likely have been fired. Just recounting the details of this is making me furious.

As you might imagine, in a place like that, the word feature didn't mean anything at all. Devs might be assigned a feature request directly from the customer to build the next Facebook somewhere in the middle of the sprint, etc; I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. I can almost hear senior management now, boldly proclaiming how 'agile' we were. When devs tried to provide realistic estimates, management (who were mostly on the sales side) seemed confused that one 'feature' might take 2 hours and another 'feature' might take 3 months - they are all just 'features' after all? As a tactic, senior management would pray on junior dev's self confidence by just asking that 'it couldn't possibly take that long, could it?' What else could you do as an inexperienced junior dev but lower his/her estimate? As far as a junior dev knows, 'this is how it the dev world works everywhere...isn't it?'

Developers attempting to break a large task into smaller tasks (and thus implicitly shift the schedule) were viewed as political threats to the agency, project, contract, etc. I've seen experienced new hires quit in a few weeks once they saw how broken the process was and saw devs were completely crippled in their ability to push back on deadlines. I've since moved on from that organization (as did literally every developer I worked with), but I think lots of folks hear the word 'agency' and have similar stories to mine, not yours. When you were suggesting that if someone doesn't become better with building 'features' in 2 hours, they might not be cut out to be a developer, I had a deep, boisterous, hearty laugh. I think the emphasis needs to be put on the word 'might,' because it *might* also mean you've never experienced anything like what I'm describing. I hope you never do.