As written by Jeff Atwood for Stack Overflow podcast 31 [1]:
Joel [Spolsky] justifies having a nice office space as 1) a recruiting tool 2) enabling higher programmer productivity and 3) the cost of a nice office space is a tiny number relative to all your other expenses running a company. I [Jeff] argue that companies which don't intuitively understand why nice office space is important to their employees who spend 8+ hours every day there... well, those companies aren't smart enough to survive anyway.
Enough said.
[1] Podcast #31, Stack Overflow Blog, blog.stackoverflow.com, 2008
