If you take the top end, shmancy digs near the VC teat you're still looking at only 10% of your engineers salary. Meanwhile in West Berkeley we signed a lease for $22 sqft/year. I share a 20X30 room with another engineer. Everyone else has a 10X10 office with a door. And we don't have rivers of VC money.
Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.
Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.