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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

Trying to save money that way always makes me shake my head. Seriously what does 100 sqft of office space cost? $200/month? Maybe $300 when you include common space? So $3600/year. Or 3% of your engineers salary? Doesn't take a very big hit in productivity to erase any savings many times over.

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The savings in office cost are measurable, the lost productivity is not.

The savings in office cost are measurable, the lost productivity is not.

It is, but not within the timeframe that someone will get their bonus/promotion for the cost savings and move on. Same scam as outsourcing.

In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years.

So dedicated office space can be expensive.

If you take the top end, shmancy digs near the VC teat you're still looking at only 10% of your engineers salary. Meanwhile in West Berkeley we signed a lease for $22 sqft/year. I share a 20X30 room with another engineer. Everyone else has a 10X10 office with a door. And we don't have rivers of VC money.

Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.

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