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Comment by brianpayne2 | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with a friend who works at a company HQ'd in NYC and he said that the average cost per person/desk was over 60k/yr. It was a lot higher than I was expecting.

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No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year.

Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.

But you don't rent by cubicle, you rent by floor or building. So adding a new employee when you have hit your max means you have to figure something out or sink a whole lot of money into a new building for one person.

Office in NYC was remodeled to open office, and the limits were determined by fire code, bathrooms, etc. In the end, a whole bunch of valuable floor space is sitting empty as relaxation rooms, a puzzle table, and funky couch areas that nobody wants to sit at because it’s next to a big boss’s office.

Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.

That size seems high. 100 sqft would be a nice sized office. Cubicles are more like 30 square feet. Douglas Coupland gave cubicles the name "veal fattening pens" in Generation X but they're actually smaller now - calf enclosures are 30-35 sqft. The latest fad with standing desks is even smaller.

https://www.wired.com/2000/05/is-your-cubicle-shrinking-too/

Yes, that's my point--the cost of raw office space for a single large cubicle/small office in Manhattan is under $10k/year. Other overhead is basically the same for a shared bench vs. large cubicle.

I'd be surprised if this is just real estate. HR and other things get rolled into overhead cost numbers.

But the portion that is ascribed to the raw footage would be under $10k/y...the other costs are not really correlated with shared bench vs cubicle vs private office.

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