The Standup Tax
Most teams underestimate the cost of "just 15 minutes." Use this calculator to see how much engineering capacity you are burning on status updates.
What does a daily standup actually cost?
For an eight-person team meeting 15 minutes a day, five days a week, at a fully loaded rate of $120 an hour, a daily standup costs roughly $84,640 a year once you count the time it takes to get back into deep work. About $63,480 of that is recoverable, or 66 engineer-days. The rest comes back as async coordination, because killing the meeting does not hand back all of the time.
That figure assumes 46 working weeks rather than 52, and 8 minutes of refocus per person rather than the 23 minutes measured for unplanned interruptions. Change any assumption below to get your own number.
8-person team · 15 min · 5×/week · $120/hr
$62,400/year
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Estimates. Not gospel. Use for decision-making, not blame.