Yea, it was a while ago, but I think we estimated the cost around $500 a year, and our average cost per developer at $100k per year.
IIRC we were paying around $20 per square foot, and the office sizes were small, like 8 by 8. So an extra 25 SF cost about $500 per year. You can make an office almost as small as a cubicle, the difference is you need space for a door to swing in, office walls are thicker than cubicle walls, and you need HVAC and power.
So there is extra expense in the build-out, but that's trivial over time if you are going to stay there a long while.
Edit: And even if you want 10 by 10 offices or my math is off, 1% a year is essentially trivial as well.
Its the same old Peopleware/Mythical Man month issues. Lets say you have 10 developers who each have an average throughput of X working as a team, but you need to double output. You double the size of the team, but get only 17X output because of the overhead of working together, so you add more developers until you end up with 25 devs providing 20X output.
What if instead you give everyone the latest fastest computers, individual offices, etc, and you make your devs 10% more productive? Now you only have increase the team size to 21 devs to get an output of 20x. Essentially you've saved 20% of your engineering payroll, over a half million dollars annually in todays dev costs, to achieve the same objective.
The costs of providing a good productive workspace is trivial in comparison to it's benefits, no matter how you measure it.
oh, i am all for efficiency and destroying cubicles, but my point was you can't just make walls of cubicle higher, put there door and call it office, office most have normal size, window, i think 3.5x3.5m is the minimum i could call room/office and that's like 3 times bigger than 2x2m cubicle (generous, world not be surprised even by smaller one), which makes it at 215$/m2 per year 1700$ additional cost per worker, not including building cost, but yeah you are right i guess, it's relatively negligible because you were in some extremely cheap place while paying devs quite reasonable salaries, so there is discrepancy
i just checked some prices and even in very cheap European capitals you would be looking into like 120$/m2, in bigger few times more
though after reading this it seem relatively cheap, seem actually cheaper than apartment, i am surprised people don't form together fake company to rent office spaces instead of apartments, they can get better deal with location and price, just kitchen and bathroom won't be so accessible
My numbers are from 25 years ago, so cost per SF for similar is probably $30+ a foot now, and engineer costs are much higher, but the percentages stay the same.
A 3.5 meter by 3.5 meter room is what many call a "two man" office. We had essentially 2.8m by 2.8m single persons, again you only need a minor more space than a cubicle. Doorway (which a cubicle needs too but not a swinging doorway) and mildly thicker walls. The ventilation goes through the ceiling, power in the walls.
You can't always have an exterior window in every office, but you can have interior glass. It's important to have enough natural light in the hallway so that the interior glass carries the natural light into the offices. You don't want long dark hallways that can only be lit by artificial light. Break up the hallway with an exterior window or an office with windows and interior glass.
IIRC we were paying around $20 per square foot, and the office sizes were small, like 8 by 8. So an extra 25 SF cost about $500 per year. You can make an office almost as small as a cubicle, the difference is you need space for a door to swing in, office walls are thicker than cubicle walls, and you need HVAC and power.
So there is extra expense in the build-out, but that's trivial over time if you are going to stay there a long while.
Edit: And even if you want 10 by 10 offices or my math is off, 1% a year is essentially trivial as well.
Its the same old Peopleware/Mythical Man month issues. Lets say you have 10 developers who each have an average throughput of X working as a team, but you need to double output. You double the size of the team, but get only 17X output because of the overhead of working together, so you add more developers until you end up with 25 devs providing 20X output.
What if instead you give everyone the latest fastest computers, individual offices, etc, and you make your devs 10% more productive? Now you only have increase the team size to 21 devs to get an output of 20x. Essentially you've saved 20% of your engineering payroll, over a half million dollars annually in todays dev costs, to achieve the same objective.
The costs of providing a good productive workspace is trivial in comparison to it's benefits, no matter how you measure it.