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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

> maybe 60sqft-ish?

For those of us with non-ridiculous units, that's 5-6 m².

That's rather small, even for a single-person office.

Sure, however I'm currently sitting in a kind of cubicle (on an open plan floor), with 4 developers sharing what seems to be about a 3.5m x 3.5m space (I'm 1.8m, and if we all stand up and put our arms out, they'd touch), which brings it to just under 13m2, or 3.2 m2 per person. There are teams that are more cramped than even this, which I find pretty sad.

My office is 4m by 8m and there is only me in it.

Boss was happy for me to work somewhere quiet and the only space we had was an unused meeting room that takes up up half the second floor of our second building.

It's glorious.

That would be an incredible luxury to some people. I've worked from what most people would call a shelf before.

Same here. A bar in a coffee shop would have compared favorably to that desk in size and ergonomics. Craziest thing about it was how at the time I was getting paid absolute tons of money, but in many ways my status at work felt more like my desk than my paycheck. I don’t know what that tells you about the human psyche, or mine. Rationally, I wouldn’t have traded much of the money for a better desk, but emotionally the money just felt like a number on a screen going up, while the desk felt visceral.

I worked from a 2.2m x 2.5m "pod" office once and it was great, but the views also helped. Imagine one wall being a massive screen window in the country side with views of a lake, and the opposite wall being mostly window, leading to a balcony overlooking and inside courtyard (where other pods also look into). The side walls were exposed brick and the ceiling was at a decent height. The entire building was an old Arabic courtyard house that had been restored.

Small spaces _can_ be amazing :)

Wow, that sounds really awesome! Do you have any pictures?

Wow — I'd like your work environment. Mine is approximately 6m² and it's shared by 8 people!

How is it even possible? 2-tier working tables?

In case I'm using the wrong terminology, I mean 6 metres x 6 metres rather than sqrt(6) metres x sqrt(6) metres.

Yep, that would be 36m^2. If it helps, think of a grid of 1m by 1m tiles laid out on the floor. How many tiles could you fit?

I always thought it was "4 metres squared" means 4x4 and "4 square metres" means 2x2. Unless 4m^2 doesn't mean "4 metres squared", which would really be confusing me ...

m² is the symbol for "square metres", so 6 m² is e.g. a room 2m x 3m

6² m² = (6m)² != 6 m²

Exponentiation usually binds more tightly than multiplication, so

  6 m² = 6 * (m²) != (6 m)²

> 2-tier working tables?

You know it was considered.

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