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Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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Your company spends $263k a year on a meeting that could be a slack message
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There is a certain kind of company that will spend six figures a year on a meeting that could be replaced by a single Slack message, and somehow still act like the problem is that employees are not “collaborating enough.”
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Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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So a team of twelve engineers, each clocking roughly 145 dollars per hour in fully loaded cost, gathers every morning for a fifteen‑minute standup. On paper that sounds like a harmless ritual, like a coffee break but with posture. In reality it is a tax on deep work disguised as “syncing.” Multiply that fifteen minutes every weekday across a year and the raw meeting time alone already hits a six‑figure bill. That is without even counting the invisible part, the part where everyone comes back to their desks and spends the next twenty‑odd minutes re‑loading their brains like a browser tab that keeps crashing. Once you add that interruption tax, the standup is basically a high‑speed money shredder that also slows down the very people it claims to help.
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What typically happens in the meeting makes it even more absurd. Over a month of tracking, one person found zero actual decisions made, and fourteen times the team said, “let’s take that offline,” which is corporate for “this is not a meeting, this is a script.” Most standups are just people reading task lists out loud while everyone else politely waits to recite their own line from the same play. The format is not broken, it is just mismatched. Five‑minute standups with a real blocker and a real fix can be useful. A fifteen‑minute meeting that is mostly theater is just an expensive way to pretend the company is doing something instead of actually changing how it works.
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The fact that companies are willing to spend that kind of money on a ritual that produces almost nothing reveals far more about their fear of structure and communication than it does about any real operational need. Standups are the corporate equivalent of a yoga class that ends in a group hug, billed as “productivity” so nobody has to admit they have no idea how to coordinate a team without making everyone sit in the same room.
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