Have you ever seen footage of the 1950s office space? Row after row of identical desks, identical chairs, and identical typewriters; all rigidly aligned to the ordinals of the office walls and a regulation distance apart. No plants. No personal photos. Nothing to make one desk stand out from another apart from a discrete "g4" or similar. And of course the physical differences in the statutorily, near-uniformed apparelled occupants.

Those practices evolved on the basis of the notion that each cog in the industrial office space was interchangable, and that any and all demarkation between cogs was a distraction from the process of work and the overall efficiency of the machine. Deskill the tasks, train lots of cheap competents and use them as components. Remove all ego, personality and variability from the equation and, the theory went, you arrive at a cost efficient industrial machine.

Do you know why you don't see this type of office much beyond the early '60s? Why the Silcon Valley giants have jakuzies and sleeping rooms and one or two man offices? And why this is how the big name/success story in software development over the last 10 years r so goes about attracting new staff:

Students, imagine if you will...

A cafeteria where the food is plentiful, delicious and, yes, free.

A workplace where dogs are welcome and there's no dress code.

A workspace where the technology sitting on top of it is powerful enough to work through any computational challenge you can devise.

A lunch table where you sit down and learn your tablemate is the world's leading authority on a problem you were only vaguely aware existed – and the guy next to her wrote the textbook you used last semester.

A campus that offers not just free meals but also a gym, an endless pool, a volleyball court, razor scooters, massage therapy, laundry rooms and dry cleaning, and (of course) valet parking.

With us so far? Now's when the fun starts. Working at Google means making a positive difference in tens of millions of lives every day. Do you love to critique the design of everyday things? Do you dream of working for an innovative, world-class organization? Are you looking to work with engineers to create products that improve the lives of millions? If so, Google may have a place for you. We hire exceptional people, at all degree levels, BS, MS, and PhD. We have offices all over the world including Mountain View, California; Santa Monica, California; Kirkland, Washington; New York, New York; Switzerland; India; and Japan, all working on the same cutting edge solutions. The people at Google love to work on innovative products and believe passionately in our mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

It's because if you deskill a job; take away a workers pride in the job they do; eliminate personal innovation, flair--and yes--ego from the workplace; you get the cheapest per-hour labour bills, because you end up with the dregs of the profession. Those with low skills, no motivation to improve, that "occupy" theirs desk for the statutory minimum hours to fulfill their job descriptions, whilst turning out the bare minimum of lowest quality work they can get away with. Combine the low productivity with the high turnover and subsequent initiation and training costs and those low pay rates suddenly become a completely false economy.

Until you can replace your humans with robots as the car industry did on their production lines, you'd better invest in training your programmers to a high standard, and valuing their innovations, skills and yes--egos. Show me a programmer who does it only for the money, and I'll show you someone who will be working for your rival next week or the week after.