Are you feeling a bit cramped at work? You’re not alone.

The New York Times reporting that to save costs, companies are cutting back the amount of personal space workers have in their offices. The paper cites a study by corporate real estate association CoreNet Globalthat finds the average workspace size for an office worker in North America dropped from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 square feet two years later…and will be down to 151 square feet in 2017.

Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer calls it a situation where life is imitating art-- comic book art.

“It’s like Dilbert coming home to roost,” he says. “Dilbert was ahead of its time. We’re all in cubes.”

Serwer adds companies feel they can get real savings by cutting down on the space each worker gets.

“Employees per square foot is the new metric for business,” he notes. “And we’re all feeling the effects.”

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Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli points out firms are also trying to convince employees it’s actually BETTER for them to have less room.

“Big companies are excellent at making it sound like a virtue,” he laughs. “It’s about teamwork, it’s about everybody being in the same room, it’s not being walled off…when it’s really about saving money.”

Yahoo Finance Columnist Rick Newman warns, though, that you can only squeeze workers so much.

“There’s clearly a point of diminishing returns,” he argues. “Mike Santoli and I share about 17 square feet of space without a wall. I learn a lot from Mike listening to him talk about the market, but there comes a limit.”

Santoli adds that the new, smaller workplace has brought about one big change from offices of the past.

“We’ve broken down all the status markers,” he says. “Mike Bloomberg runs Bloomberg in the middle of the newsroom, right?”

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