Okay, but if you are hired after the new offices were designed, you now have no input into the design and no "right" to customize the environment. I"m not a fan

Okay, but if you are hired after the new offices were designed, you now have no input into the design and no "right" to customize the environment. I"m not a fan of the Zappos office (it would drive me bonkers) but I do think folks should have a right to express their personality in their work environment so that they can feel more at "home". 37signals doesn't just look clean, it looks severe, sterile and unwelcoming - I remember a lot of dot-com marketing firms having offices like that in New York (anyone else remember the shark tanks at KPE?) As I look around my work space right now, it's reasonably "business-like" but it's also obvious there is a lot of WORK getting done - white boards covered in post-its and sketches, index cards with stories tacked to the wall, etc. Those artifacts allow our team to cooperate better, but they're also part of how we "own" the space and make it ours.