This comment seems like pure provocation or something. What does it matter what you can imagine?

Stack Overflow, for instance, famously gives private offices to all developers, even junior ones, and even in Manhattan.

I worked previously at a defense research lab in the eastern US, and had my own office straight out of undergrad (it didn’t even occur to me to ask).

I have former colleagues or friends working in private offices in: computer graphics form film, defense research, hospital research, quantitative investing, adtech, large ecommerce retailer, and education tech.

Private offices are utterly not a luxury. They are a basic tool. One simple reason is because they are cost efficient, so you don’t spend more on offices in any sense but the most narrow-minded. Other reasons include all of the decades of research on their basic ergonomic benefits.

This would be like calling an ergonomic chair or a trackball mouse “a luxury” because they superficially appear to cost (slightly) more than basic alternatives, without accounting for the cost-savings they cause. And, like offices, it’s a trivial extra cost for the company.

> “Depending on where the company is operating out of, the rent for the floor space of their office could cost more than the company pays the employee.”

Given that this is not true in Manhattan (e.g. see Stack Overflow’s big write-ups on it), can you provide data to show where this is true?

You're absolutely right about the floor space, I had not considered 3x4m glass boxes, and I apologise that my post came across that way (pure provocation) -- perhaps I was in a sour mood. I have not worked for a significantly wealthy company in my history, and so it has never been the case that a private office has been the most cost-effective way to improve profits. To make a reasonable argument: Typically the equation is simply money-in vs money-out. If you can spend an extra 100k a year on private offices for developers and get 300k a year in chargeable services/development effort, vs spending 100k on another salesman and get an extra $1m in net profit, which would you choose? The choice here is clear and 2 monitors vs 1 monitor is a $100 cost for 1.5x efficiency, and is an absolute no-brainer. An office on the other hand is usually not the most cost-effective option, but if you have enough cash to fund all of the other more cost-effective strategies plus private offices, then it is another place in which management can increase profits.

Please follow up with your thoughts, and again, I apologise if what I wrote was inflammatory or came across that way. It was likely coming from a position of "unknown unknowns".