Is It Worth It? - Griffin

Every minute saved per person adds up quickly when you multiply by the number of employees and work days. The article starts with an XKCD-style formula that tells you how much time you can invest in improving a task before the break-even point is reached, using a five-year horizon as a baseline. It then re-derives the calculation for a corporate setting, showing that a single minute saved per person each day translates to four hours of ROI in a year.

Applying the model to a flaky test scenario, the author walks through concrete numbers: a five-minute test suite, a 10% flake rate, three runs per developer per day, and a five-person team result in 30 hours of lost work annually - roughly five work days. That makes a week-long effort to eliminate the flake clearly justified. Scaling the same math to a ten-person monorepo over three years yields thirty work days of saved time, reinforcing the argument that tooling investments pay off fast.

The insight is that the cost of friction grows linearly with headcount (O(n)), while the cost to fix it is essentially constant (O(1)). Once enough people benefit, even modest improvements become worthwhile. The article argues that tech companies typically under-allocate developer time to internal tooling, suggesting that 10-20% of an engineering team should focus on eliminating such waste.

For leaders, the takeaway is simple: quantify the daily pain points, multiply by headcount and work days, and compare that to the effort required to fix them. If the math shows a positive ROI within a year or two, allocate resources to the fix now rather than deferring it indefinitely.