At some point I started doing math on how much Agile ceremonies actually cost. Not in "productivity" or "morale" or whatever. In actual money.
We had 8 engineers in a room for 4 hours every two weeks. Average fully loaded cost around $80/hr per engineer. That's $2,560 per session. Twice a month. $66,560 a year. To assign made-up numbers to tickets that would change scope by Wednesday anyway.
Nobody ever questioned this. Not once. If I told finance I needed $66k for a new tool there would be 3 months of procurement review. But burning that same amount on a recurring meeting where grown engineers hold up cards with numbers on them? That's just "the process."
I saw a post recently where a guy built a tool over a weekend that automated most of what his Scrum Master did. Ran standups, tracked blockers, generated sprint reports. Whole thing took him 2 days.
The responses were split. Half the people said "that's not what a SM really does" and the other half said "that's exactly what our SM does." Both groups were right about their own experience and that's kind of the point.
When a role can be automated by one dev in a weekend at some companies but is supposedly critical leadership at others, maybe the role isn't well defined enough to justify a full salary everywhere.
I'm not saying good SMs don't exist. I've met maybe two in 25 years. But the hit rate is terrible and the floor is basically a meeting scheduler with a certification.
Here's the thing that kills me. After all the ceremonies, the points, the sprints, the retros, the SM, the PO, the whole apparatus. Most teams are still doing waterfall. Scope is fixed before the sprint starts. Budget was locked last quarter. Deadline was promised to a client 6 months ago. Nothing is going to "emerge" or "pivot" or "respond to change."
We just report status more frequently now. That's the actual difference. Instead of a monthly project update we give a biweekly one. We renamed the Gantt chart to a "sprint board" and the project manager to a Scrum Master.
A VP at a Fortune 500 said it better than I can. Calling it a Sprint doesn't make you faster. It just makes you tired.
So what's the actual Agile tax? At my last org it was roughly:
- $66k/yr on planning poker
- $130k/yr on a SM salary for a role one dev automated in a weekend
- 4-6 hours per week per engineer in ceremonies
Multiply that across the team and we were spending more time talking about work than doing work
And the end result was the same waterfall we always did. Just with more meetings and a Jira board.
Anyone else done this math at their company? Curious if the numbers are similar or if we were just especially bad at this.
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