Comment by CydeWeys
The thing is, when it's taking millions of dollars in equipment to fit out a lab, many engineers are all sharing that equipment. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars to buy duplicates of all that nice equipment for every single engineer to have at home, plus many of those engineers won't even have space for the equipment at home anyway! I live in a relatively small apartment with my girlfriend. We struggled during the pandemic because we don't even have space for two proper work desks. We definitely don't have a bunch of extra space for lots of lab equipment.
There’s also a calibration cycle for much of that equipment that can run high hundreds for simple equipment to several thousand and often is done annually. That’s another cost that is snowshoed out across the multiple employees using a shared lab.