
Ask HN: How do I persuade my employer expand to larger office? - thrwwy-sardine
Hi HN,<p>I work for a ~41 person company that will be growing to mid-60s by the end of 2017.  10 of us are software engineers.  We&#x27;re in a cool &quot;high concept&quot; designed office, but it&#x27;s open office. That was fine for me for awhile, but they recently added 8 more desks, and I feel positively cramped. I measured my personal space, and it&#x27;s 40 sq ft.  (In the previous layout I had about 60sq ft.) This is 40 sq ft in a 3x11 block of desks. About 70% of them are occupied.  We have 2 conference rooms and two &quot;living rooms&quot;. The conference rooms are always busy and the living rooms often contain the overflow of extra meetings that are going on.<p>There are plans to move to a new office, but I believe that they&#x27;re going to keep this layout for the next 6-12 months.<p>I&#x27;m going to talk to the office manager &amp; finance person about my discomfort with how much space I have. I&#x27;d like to cite a more formal study too, but the only thing I have is Peopleware, which was published in 1999 and references an IBM or Microsoft studies that are even older.<p>Are there modern studies about productivity per square footage?  My google-fu is failing me.<p>How have you persuaded your employer to upgrade offices sooner rather than later?
======
GFK_of_xmaspast
Real estate moves slowly, you're probably going to just have to deal with it
or quit. I did find this tho:
[http://www.officefinder.com/howmuchofficespace2.html](http://www.officefinder.com/howmuchofficespace2.html)
which suggests 80 ft2.

~~~
greenyoda
I'd agree with this. Leasing office space for 60 people - in a desirable
location that has affordable cost and can accommodate some future expansion -
is a slow process. After that, preparing the space and moving in takes extra
time. Add even more time for an area where real estate is expensive and the
vacancy rate is low. So your working conditions are not likely to improve in
the short term (next few months), even assuming that management is looking for
new space right now.

40 square feet sounds like way to little space for a developer. That's just a
bit more than a 6x6 foot cubicle, which is the kind of space I'd expect to see
allocated for a phone support person, not a developer who needs to do
demanding intellectual work.

If you don't want to quit, your best bet to get more space (and higher
productivity) might be to try to negotiate a work-from-home arrangement.

