Companies consider abandoning open office layouts to prevent disease spread
So I was last in the office in early March. First it was a week of recommended WFH followed by a predictable shift to mandatory WFH but I&#x27;d already decided that NYC was not the place where I wanted to be when this all played out so I exiled myself.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t know what going back to the office looks like at this point, both in timing and the logistics. The fact of the matter is that we have open plan layouts with minimal space per employee (basically a desk plus chair) because of cost. An office per employee simply doesn&#x27;t scale for the size of the big tech companies if they want to have offices in coastal urban areas.<p>I haven&#x27;t run the numbers on this but I&#x27;d guess it averages out at about 60sq ft per employee in the desk area and probably twice that once you factor in all the meeting rooms. It may even be as high as 150sq ft.<p>As an example since there are public numbers on this, Google&#x27;s building on 111 8th Ave is, I believe, 2.1 million square feet of rentable space divided over 16 floors. Higher floors have smaller footprints so for the lower floors that&#x27;s probably around 160,000 sq ft. I don&#x27;t know the number of employees per floor but I believe it&#x27;s around 1500 give or take so this would fit the estimate of 120-150sq ft per employee.<p>Google bought that building for $1.9B. It&#x27;s probably appreciated some since then but probably not hugely, being commercial. Let&#x27;s say it&#x27;s $3B. That&#x27;s a value of $1400&#x2F;sq ft. Assume an 8% gross yield then 140sq ft of space costs ~$2M and has an opportunity cost of almost $160,000.<p>Doubling that space gets real expensive. Even if you&#x27;re prepared to pay it, having room for the ~8000 employees you have gets impractical. 111 8th Ave is already one of the largest buildings in NYC (by rentable square feet). Google have already overflown to Chelsea Market and 85 10th Ave and probably more by now (I left ~3 years ago).<p>Social distancing is going to be a thing for the foreseeable future. People have this weirdly optimistic view that we can just develop a vaccine or an effective treatment for this. There are many diseases that have killed millions and been around for decades that still have no vaccine (eg HIV, malaria, dengue fever).<p>In fact, no coronavirus to date has had a vaccine developed for it.<p>It&#x27;s unclear what will happen with Covid-19. will it mutate and become something you seasonally just &quot;get&quot; like the flu? We have flu vaccines but they&#x27;re partially effective and the virus mutates such that you need a different vaccine every year.<p>Generally speaking, viruses tend to get less deadly over time (eg Spanish flu evolved into H1N1 eventually) but it doesn&#x27;t seem like Covid-19 is particularly deadly now. You might point to the number of deaths in each country but the number of infections in almost all cases is underreported. Some don&#x27;t even realize they&#x27;ve had it.<p>Or will herd immunity kick in at some point?<p>But I look at all this and wonder if I&#x27;ll get back into the office <i>this year</i>.<p>Even when I do, I just don&#x27;t think more space or private offices are in my future. I also don&#x27;t foresee a WFH revolution. So it&#x27;s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.