The Opportunity Cost of a Free Pizza
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote this post in a quiet rage after an unfortunate encounter with a leader who’d taken some information about agile teams being “two-pizza teams” a bit too literally. I still get fired up about scenarios like this: when leaders conflate what is urgent with what is important, when they fail to acknowledge and respect employees’ need to have full lives outside of work, and when they condescend to their team with naïve ideas about motivating others.
It’s 4:55 p.m. on a Wednesday, and my Scrum team is just wrapping up a 90-minute estimation meeting. We have two user stories left. I say, “It’s almost 5:00 and we got through a lot today – we can finish up these last two tomorrow morning before our planning meeting.” The click of laptops closing, the rustle of chairs, and then this from the project stakeholder we’d generously (or foolishly) invited to sit in and observe: “Hey y’all, if you want to just stick around a couple more hours and power through this, I’ll buy you pizza.”
A long pause follows.
Your economics survey course in college taught you there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or a free pizza for that matter. So before we high-five each other about our good fortune (Free pizza! Gee whiz!), we should probably consider what that pizza is really going to cost our team.
Let’s look around the room for a minute. There are seven developers, one designer, one development manager, one product owner, and one Scrum Master (me). We range in age from 24 to 48. Eight of us have kids. Seven of us are married. Sticking around two hours late after work with no advance notice leaves our heroes with some tough economic choices to make.
Joe could choose to call his wife and tell her he’s going to be two hours late getting home. She’ll have to pick up the kids from soccer practice, make dinner, and supervise homework instead of going to her book club that night as they’d planned because he has the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a free slice of pizza! Joe mentally pockets the monetary equivalent of his pizza share and puts it toward the marriage counseling session he’ll have to schedule for later that week, the flowers he’ll have to pick up on the way home, and the extra hour of personal training to work off the unplanned calories. So, if Joe subtracts his $5 pizza bonus from the $150 for therapy, $30 for flowers, and $60 at the gym, his net opportunity cost is a mere $235. What a deal!
How about me? I’m a single mom with a three-year-old in daycare. My daughter’s daycare charges BY THE MINUTE for every minute I’m late after 6 p.m. Plus, even though this isn’t documented in the daycare handbook, I’m pretty sure after an hour they put the kid in an Uber and have the driver do donuts in the parking lot until a parent arrives on scene. No returns, no exchanges, just a hefty ridesharing bill plus gratuity. If we do the math, my pizza-tunity cost would be…
Late Daycare Pickup: $10 per minute x 120 minutes = $1200
Uber to Nowhere Plus Tip: $200+
Total: $1,400 and counting
Free Pizza with My Coworkers: Priceless!
The numbers don’t lie. I simply can’t afford to take up our stakeholder on his generous offer, so I decline. So does the rest of my team.
Why your free pizza demeans us both
I’m not anti-pizza, and I’m not against people buying me things either. But your free pizza insults me, and I’d like to tell you why.
We all know food is a powerful motivator. For dogs. And maybe some college students. But it’s not particularly motivating for highly-paid developers who are well into adulthood and can feed themselves quite well, thank you very much. Developers are motivated chiefly by interesting work. They are demotivated by not having the right environmental conditions for success. Your possibly well-intentioned free pizza is the first tiny crack in that foundation.
Why? When you ask me to “power through” something that’s not terribly important or critical at the last minute, you reveal two things:
You are unable or unwilling to distinguish between meaningful deadlines and meaningless ones.
You and I don’t seem to agree on the value of my time.
Allow me to illustrate my first point. From my training in project management, I know that every project has certain tasks and milestones that are critically important (in fact, we refer to these as “the critical path”), and other tasks and milestones that are less so. If you push your team to treat every task and milestone as if they’re critical, you lose your ability to push for those that do really matter. Put another way, you only have so much political capital to spend on getting extra effort out of your team. Don’t blow the whole wad on a simple estimation exercise at the beginning of the project!
To the second point, we’ve already established what the value of my time is during working hours. You and I have both agreed what every hour I spend at the office between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. is worth, and you pay me that amount every two weeks. Thank you for that. But after 5 p.m., my rate goes up. Way up. It’s the time I have to spend with my family, run errands, do chores, see friends -- or have a life, in other words. Pizza as compensation for that time falls pretty far short.