Joel mentions "Peopleware" again.

"Peopleware" is one of my favorite books of all time.  I can't stress how important it is to read this book.  Anyway the following comes from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html


I went to a Computer Science conference at Yale. One of the speakers, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded or led quite an honor roll of venture-capital funded startups, held up the book Peopleware.

"You have to read this book," he said. "This is the bible of how to run a software company. This is the most important book out there for how to run software companies."

...

After the speech I went up to the speaker. "I agree with you about Peopleware," I said. "Tell me: did you have private offices for your developers at all your startups?"

"Of course not," he said. "The VCs would never go for that."