Cubicles were an especial hypocrisy. They cost more per office than carpentered walls. In which case they made no sense at all.
Don't underestimate the cost of that 8x8 cube, Its astronomical. Up to $10,000 though of course you can get crap for $500.
When I built our office out, it cost $150 per walled-off office plus door.
That stuff doesn’t exist when a space is being completely remodeled either. I work in construction doing tenant improvements, so I see a lot of construction drawings.
https://www.bunnings.com.au/gyrprock-csr-3600-x-1200-x-16mm-...
That's non-trade price, probably something like $US42 each. So, couple hundred bucks for that, then the rest (taping, joining, painting). Then the electrical.
That's without labour costs.
My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?
Power poles are less common, but still used sometimes. It costs less for open area lighting vs lighting an office.
You can buy decent cubes for $2000, with full-height walls.
I’m not a fan of working in an open office layout, fwiw.
At my old job, we devised a way to make an "office door" out of a section of cube wall that was only attached on one side with a rubber sheath used to hide the seams. It actually worked out pretty well.
The average office that has cubicles, though, is also one that’s wired for per-employee power delivery.
Or, I could say it as the reverse: if you know you’re setting up an office to have fixed workstations (e.g. a CG art department in a video game studio; or any department in a company with a pipeline whose main software is a hog, like desktop publishing), then you’ll likely set up with cubicles rather than open-plan, because a workstation kind of implies gradual personalization with bunch of surrounding cruft that needs floors and walls and shelving.
(I have a feeling that even in FAANG, the people who use workstations aren’t sitting in open-plan areas. Anyone care to speak to that?)
And, because of this, the “standard” kind of cubicle partitions are expensive, because they’re also expected to work to handle part of the wiring requirements for power delivery. If they were just plyboard, they’d be cheap; but they’re not just plyboard.
The space required by that door could add 25-50% to your total space requirements compared to cubes of the same size.
And that's before we add human perception as an element... offices the size of a cube are a horrible experience. They need to be considerably larger to feel like the same amount of space.
I've only seen the full-height cubicle in American films, but most of the stuff -- desk, shelves and so on -- is still required in an individual office. They don't require a real door or doorframe, and electricity and network connections can be run fairly cheaply under the floor.
What am I missing?
The wiring etc are needed for both. Folks keep trying to refactor stuff into office costs, but that's all needed for both.
But I'm not a highly paid office furniture consultant, nor a sociologist/anthropologist, so what do I know.
And how many times do the cubicles get moved, at all? Short of a move-out to another space, I'd guess the median cubicle is never moved.
You want some flexible space, plan for it. But the 'open office plan' was always a hoax.
Redoing walls requires paying architects to get plans, getting bids from contractors, getting approvals from building management and potentially opening our lease up to negotiations regarding tenant improvements, getting contractor's insurance vetted, getting walls demo'd, paying to get everything disposed of, paying for new materials and installation, repainting, getting electricians to redo electricity and lighting for the space, potentially doing new low voltage runs (don't want to run cat6 out the door) and getting proper permitting to do all of this.
I don't know how moving a cubicle gets to be more expensive when comparing how many more people are involved to rebuild and that one requires a couple of hours while the other takes days at best.
Sure you can horse some cubicles around in a tiny shop with no oversight. But to move a department on a floor is an extended effort either way - move out, teardown, rewiring, maintenance (cubicles wear out and parts are expensive), cleaning and reassembly including built-in furniture.
My point is simply, drywall is a tiny fraction of the cost of expensive portable reusable modular units. In an office movein I took part in, the drywall and doors took a week. Took longer to order, get delivery and drop power/network to the 4 cubicles in the back room later when we expanded there . And the cubicles cost as much for 4, as the entire buildout for the front 20 people.
One way requires getting permits, bringing in tons of contractors, throws away a ton of old materials to be replaced with identical new materials, having insurance compared and validated, have new installations inspected and permitted by governments, and carries far more liability for the property management. One requires us to just unsnap some parts, carry over the light parts to another area, and snap it all together. Which seems like the obviously cheaper one?
Sure, I'll agree to some extent that upon an initial buildout the cost for individual offices versus high-end cubicle equipment may be a wash. However, the whole point of going with the cubicle equipment is that its then cheap to reconfigure. You don't need architects to draw plans to get certified by the city for how you snap together the cubicles. You do when you're making new offices.
Note: this is mostly about re-arranging in an already occupied space. Sure, if you're having to do a fresh build out where you're moving to things can definitely be up in the air. But I was just in an instance of re-arranging an existing space where we moved cubicles around and split offices with new walls/doors. Moving cubicles around was done in a couple of hours with $0 worth of new materials. Splitting the offices cost >$800/ea (not including employee productivity time towards managing this project) involving three different outside contractors, lease negotiations, permit requirements, and took a couple of weeks.