I think Malcolm Gladwell (of "Tipping Point" fame) offered amazing insights in an article from the New Yorker a few years ago. (Now on his site.) It's a great read, but his main point is to compare the office to a well-functioning urban neighborhood... Greenwich Village in NYC being the example drawn from Jane Jacob's urban-planning classic "Death and Life of Great American Cities." There are a lot of specific ideas in the article about what makes individuals happy in an office environment(the thrust of most comments here as well) but the really interesting stuff concerns the way that an office's arrangement influences how people interact... and how that in turn influences the office's ability to share information and support creativity. I've referred several people making office-layout decisions to the article, to great effect. It's not coder-specific, but very focused on creativity... so to the extent that you are concerned about creativity in your coding environment, it is likely to have great information for you.
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I think Malcolm Gladwell (of "Tipping Point" fame) offered amazing insights in an article from the New Yorker a few years ago. (Now on his site.) It's a great read, but his main point is to compare the office to a well-functioning urban neighborhood... Greenwich Village in NYC being the example drawn from Jane Jacob's urban-planning classic "Death and Life of Great American Cities." There are a lot of specific ideas in the article about what makes individuals happy in an office environment(the thrust of most comments here as well) but the really interesting stuff concerns the way that an office's arrangement influences how people interact... and how that in turn influences the office's ability to share information and support creativity. I've referred several people making office-layout decisions to the article, to great effect. It's not coder-specific, but very focused on creativity... so to the extent that you are concerned about creativity in your coding environment, it is likely to have great information for you.