office space ... really

Joel Spolsky maintains an excellent page of articles on software development. His latest (Bionic Office) covers an important aspect of software personnel management: space. A great read, with lots of pictures. Hope someone out there who has the power to make a decision on floor and space planning reads this. One of the reasons Joel offers for considering this to be important is especially cute (perhaps for the India reference): Having drop-dead gorgeous, private, windowed offices makes it a lot easier to recruit the kinds of superstars that produce ten times as much as the merely brilliant software developers. If I have to compete at New York salaries against Bangalore salaries, I'm going to need those superstars, so when people come in for an interview, I need to see jaws on the floor. It's about drama.