The problem is, good office space is expensive. Just as it's cheaper to eat mass-market junk than to shop for organic food, it's cheaper to pack your employees into veal-fattening pens, turn on the bad fluorescent lighting, and imagine that having everyone together in one place will result in magical "teamwork" synergy that makes up for the pain.
I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.
Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown, and presumably, they know something about programmer happiness...
There are a lot of cheap office spaces that are great to work in. The trouble is, they tend to be small.
For example, I suspect Yahoo was paying more per square foot for the grim cube farm we moved to after getting bought than Viaweb was for our cheery offices on the top floor of a triple-decker in Harvard Sq.
I think the problem with big company offices is that the office space available in large quantities tends to be grim. It seems like you have to pay a fortune to make office space both pleasant and large.
The problem may not be impossible to solve, though. I doubt many big companies have tried to make offices that were large, pleasant, and cheap. There might be solutions if someone looked for them.
I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.
Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown, and presumably, they know something about programmer happiness...