The cost of a (stand-up) meeting.

Let’s talk about the cost of a stand-up meeting.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a senior programmer can make $300,000/year or more. Starting salaries are more around $175K. Let’s average at $250K to make the math easy. (Adjust the numbers for your own locale, of course.)

Your cost to the company is higher than your salary. People typically use a “load factor” multiplier to convert from what you pay an employee to their actual cost to the company (which includes benefits, HR costs, stock options, etc.). When I was a CTO, I used a 2x load factor.

So, the “fully-loaded” cost of a senior programmer is $500K/year. There are about 250 workdays in a year—2,000 hours—so that fully loaded salary comes to $250/hour. That’s how much you cost the company.

That “15-minute” standup takes an hour when you factor in conversations after the meeting, context-swap overhead, and other distractions. (Context-swap overhead alone, including time to return to a flow state, counts for about 20 minutes.)

$250/person * 5 people/team * 10 teams * 250 workdays/year == $3,125,000. That’s million, with an m.

If you use a collaborative-working technique like mob/ensemble programming instead of scatter-gather, you don’t need a standup. So, using mob/ensemble programming saves the company $3M/year on that single factor alone. (It’s actually more when you factor in the time value of money, as any good MBA would do.)

I am not saying, by the way, “do what you’re doing now, but without standups.” That obviously won’t work. I am saying, “There are ways of working that do not require standups; consider using them.” That is, you need to change the way that you do the work to make dropping a standup feasible.

Worth thinking about.