A cost that never reaches an invoice is never cross-examined

An open seat at your firm is costing money nobody has counted. Outsource Accelerator reported on an op-ed by Sambhav Aggarwal for DevOps.com that finally put a figure on one. Aggarwal argues that outsourced software development fails on process rather than on the model itself. The figure is the part that stayed with me.

Hiring a senior full-stack engineer in the US or UK takes four to six months on average. Then 60 to 90 days more before meaningful work begins. Aggarwal runs that against a startup carrying $200,000 in monthly expenses. More than $400,000, gone before the engineer ships a production feature. No purchase order, no vendor, no line item. Nobody signs off on that spend because nobody records it.

What the empty chair costs

Startup arithmetic does not transfer to a firm cleanly, and I do not think it needs to. A partner absorbing a paralegal's work is still billing, the revenue lands, and nothing looks broken. Leave the seat open, split the work across two desks that are already full, and payroll will look better. An open seat reads as a saving on the payroll line, and nobody ever made it a number. The loss surfaces later, as slower matters and later collections. A cost that never reaches an invoice is never cross-examined.

A firm buys that delay whether or not it writes it down anywhere.