[JoeAltmaier]

Ceiling, lights, windows, HVAC already exist. Wiring is already needed (data,power) The difference is some wallboard and a hollow-core door.

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.

[quickthrowman]

It cost $150 to have an office framed, dry walled, taped and muddled, and painted? Please explain how this is possible, the 5/8th drywall for both sides of the wall is practically that much for materials alone.

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.

[justinclift]

Yeah. Looking here in Aust, this seems like the right kind of plasterboard (from a local hardware chain):

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.

[JoeAltmaier]

But you understand, there's not a lot of difference in the lighting and power. Not fair to add that to the cost of offices, and then pretend its free for cubicles.

My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?

[quickthrowman]

Cubicle groups are either fed from a whip coming out of the wall, or the whip coming out of a poke-thru device. It’s a single connection point, and the devices can be snap-in for ease of installation.

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.

[mywittyname]

They are also dead-simple to install. It's like IKEA furniture levels of complication.

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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

With cubicles you can run the cords to centralized sockets somewhere near the cubes - do you run the cords out the door of your office?

[derefr]

If you assume everyone has a full workstation drawing 1500w peak, you really can't share sockets.

[mywittyname]

The cubes I've assembled use solid core cable whips that are rated for 40 amps (like you'd hook up an hot water heater with) and serve four units. We never had power issues even though we all used pretty beefy hardware (think Xeons and Quadro RTXs) with dual monitors, a UPS, cube lights, etc.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Many offices are full of only laptops - those are drawing ~200 Watts peak, and then may another 100 for a couple of monitors and peripherals. That's many more users. My office has literally that - boxes with 4 sockets each in the middle of a shared space which we all run our power-bars to.

[derefr]

Sure, the open-plan ones of today are amenable to a low degree of wiring. The types of employees made to sit in those offices are amenable to a low degree of wiring.

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.

[kube-system]

You're all missing the biggest expense: real estate.

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.

[driverdan]

That doesn't make sense. Material costs alone are more than $150 for an 8x8 office with a door. Was that cost subsidized by the building owner?