What does waiting on the build cost you?
Twelve minutes is a coffee break. Twelve minutes, four times a day, times everyone waiting on the same pipeline, times a year — that is a salary you already pay without having hired anyone.
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”Nobody gets budget for four minutes. Everybody gets it for a full-time role.”
Your numbers
Everyone waiting on the same pipeline.
Pushes, PR checks, rebuilds after a fix — anything that starts the pipeline.
From push to verdict. Use the median, not the best run you have seen.
Assumptions
The two numbers worth arguing about. Change them until you find them fair — the result recalculates as you go.
Nobody sits still the whole time. But few get anything meaningful done in twelve minutes either, and switching tasks has its own cost. We assume 60%.
Salary, employer contributions and overhead — not a consulting rate. SEK 850 is a low estimate for Sweden.
What the waiting costs you
That is 0.7 full-time roles doing nothing but waiting.
Per developer that is 4 hours a week — rarely enough for anyone to raise it as a problem.
It shows in the margin
No single wait is dramatic, but together it is several hundred hours a year. Enough to show up in your delivery pace — and just small enough never to reach anyone’s priority list.
How we calculate it
- 10 developers × 4 builds/day × 12 min × 220 working days
- 105,600 min/year
- 105,600 min ÷ 60
- 1,760 h waiting/year
- 1,760 h × 60% genuinely lost
- 1,056 h/year
- 1,056 h × SEK 850/hour
- SEK 897,600
220 working days per year, after weekends, public holidays and five weeks of leave. One full-time role counts as 1,600 hours per year. Both are rounded down — better too low than too flattering.
What to do about it
Start with the most expensive steps: cache dependencies, run the test suites in parallel, and move whatever does not need to block off the critical path. The glossary explains CI/CD, and Developer Experience is the engagement where the pipeline becomes someone's stated job rather than everyone's side task.
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