I liked your choice of topic. The right balance of those two different cultures is hard to find… but totally worth it.

Why do we exclude the possibility of employees at 37signals playing a dramatic role to the design of the new office?
From what we read on their book, it seems impossible for 37signals to have an “unspoken message” about..anything!
I want to believe that this design choice was not based on one opinion.
Personally, i’m a Zappos geek

I prefer the Etsy office over all others I’ve seen so far:

http://mashable.com/2010/10/13/etsy-office-pics/

Interesting article Ryan, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You mentioned that you shouldn’t force your aesthetics on your team—that might well be the case in a bigger, more diverse company like Zappos. 37signals proud themselves with their minimalistic and pragmatic approach, and being selective in their recruitment process they only hire people who share those views, thus making their office style perfect for everyone who works there.

As for office not being your product—for 37signals to some extent it is considering they also offer training in the so-called 37signals Theatre.

I’ve met Ryan Singer, DHH, and Jason Fried on separate occasions, and they’re all very nice guys individually. However, their collective voice and company culture feels very factual, rigid, and unfun. Sure, they pepper their blog with posts that aren’t work related, but they always seem forced and scheduled.

Do they work to live, or live to work? I don’t think it has to be one or the other, and in fact, I like to keep that line fuzzy. While I agree with 37signals that there is no mojito island, that also doesn’t mean you have to work yourself to death. Plenty of people bring laptops to the beach.

Interesting. Zappos feels like MySpace and 37signals like Facebook. I’d prefer something like Squarespace

I agree the team should have some amount of freedom on office personalization. How do you balance it? I would be miserable working in a space like Zappos’, but other people obviously thrive on it, so how do you bring both together?

All though I admire them as a business and really buy into their core values in all honesty there is no way I could work in the Zappos office. I’m completely OCD about my working environment and I find it ties directly to my levels of concentration.

You assume that the 37signals team had no input into the office. We set the motif for our office to be an art gallery, and run events for the whole team to come in and realize that (paint, assemble, rearrange, contribute art). 37signals fights hard for a clean, fun, minimalist product. They have good taste. Their office reflects this.

I really like the 37Signals office, but… would one be allowed to rollerskate around it? I mean, look at all that space!

I wouldn’t want to work in either environment, actually. They are each a bit too extreme.

zappos.com’s offices remind me of EA’s offices in the 90′s— do occasional nerf wars get in the way of coding? Nope, not in the least; particularly if you have a handy bin of nerf objects by your side

Yikes! Perhaps a happy medium? Zappos offices look claustrophobic but fun, while 37signals is WAY too empty and stark. Both would hamper my creativity.

There is a big difference in giving your team the freedom to make their area’s comfortable and fun, and your team going to the unnecessary extreme to turn the office into a garbage dump. I’m willing to bet these employee’s wouldn’t take the same steps in their own environment outside of work to make it “comfortable”.

For me, I love clean minimalist look (but not look like a museum though) where 37signals has that. I also think that the look may not be for everyone. I agree with the points you have stated and I think that there must be some type of compromise with your employees so that they are comfortable where they work at.

If you let your employee give feedback and find a compromise, maybe that would be enough for them to be happy and not be a problem.

Agreed. I like to have my workspace clean but i can see the benefits of employees having some creative freedom with their own area.

Personally I like the 37signals office, but if you dropped a crumb would you get the axe?

Perhaps it depends on your company culture more than a ‘one size fits all’ approach. I mean Zappos and 37Signals are different companies, is it surprising that while both successful they may take different approaches and both may work well in their overall culture?

To understand this better, you would need to identify the use of each part of their spaces. Zappos has a HUGE customer service department, and sells tons of physical product, and with what can be assumed to be unpredictable/variable customer responses based on sales, web, inventory and delivery. Zappos employees should feel confident in their ability to creatively solves problems for their customers, and that their company backs them up all the way.

37Signals, on the other hand, has a much smaller environment of more mixed use, and have a greater need to manufacture steady, trusted cycles to push great software. And for that, the space suits them well. From my visit, I thought it was a ton of thoughtful space (you don’t see a lot of the artwork from these photos, and there’s music in the kitchen). It was a bit large for the amount of people there, and a tad too quiet for me–but they seem to work well there, will obviously grow and the space will get it’s personality and flair over time.

All I know is I’d much rather work in the 37Signals offices. The Zappos offices give me a headache just looking at pictures. I’d probably ‘go postal’ if I had to work in them.

All I know is I’d much rather work in the 37Signals offices. The Zappos offices give me a headache just looking at pictures. I’d probably ‘go postal’ if I had to work in them.

All I know is I’d much rather work in the 37Signals offices. The Zappos offices give me a headache just looking at pictures. I’d probably ‘go postal’ if I had to work in them.

Eh, I like the idea of being allowed to do what I want in my space but I’d rather work in 37Signals – I don’t have to try as hard to make it feel awesome as I like clean modern lines too. A few personalization on the desk like framed photos and little toys would suffice.

I totally belive in what I call “auto self expression”.
Great point you brought to us.

Life is not about buy a Ferrari, is abou how many people you can make happier.

Keep writting interesting things

While I’m not particularly fond of either office I’m sure I could adapt. In saying that, I think it’s important to be able to stamp your own personality on your area so if I had to make a choice I’d go with the Zappos office – 37signals just looks too fancy and unadaptive.

I think the difference is just about creative output. The Zappos offices are full of customer service people. Now, I know that Zappos encourages their customer service people to be creative with their job, but that job is just not one where you produce a lot of creative output. On the other hand, someone working at 37s (aside from /their/ customer service folks) is producing code and design as their job. At the end of the day they’ve produced something that was creatively fulfilling (if not every single day, then at least once in a while). When a customer service rep gets done with their day at Zappos they might feel great about delivering happiness, but their creative soul is still yearning to leave a tangible mark on the world. So they put up colorful streamers and whatnot.

When a Zappos customer service rep is on her way to the office, she’s thinking about how to dress up her cube. When a 37s programmer is headed to the office, he’s thinking about how to implement a new feature. For that employee, it’s a good thing the office is taken care of for them.

And there is personal preference, of course. Personally, I’d be stressed as hell working at the Zappos office. Too much clutter and visual loudness. It’s like a jungle vs. a zen garden. Both are beautiful and inspiring, but if I’m going to get down to doing some great work I’d personally rather do it in a zen garden than a jungle.

One other message that is clear and consistent from Tony, Jason, and David is that they hire people that are like-minded. Zappos is quite proud of turning people away that aren’t a /perfect/ fit for the culture. I expect the same is true for 37s. If you’re a potential employee and you walk into either of these offices are don’t react with “I’m home!” then you aren’t going to work out. If your office ends up compromising in the middle (as many other posters have suggested), then you’ve probably compromised too much in the hiring process.

I would personally like to work in 37signals’ office more, but that’s just me. #minimalist

Wow…Zappos office looks like a mini-aquarium for humans while 37Signals office looks like a geek’s dream house!

Zappos’s office looks like the carnival here in Brazil.

My first thought was how a mixture of the two would be best, professional clean middle areas and crazy personal offices (though ones in personal space so as not to create visual chaos for everybody).

But that brought back an internal struggle I have with the personal office in general. I very much enjoy that quiet space, but the seclusion and seeming arrogance of being shut off from peers ruins the niceties. Have not found that balance yet.

Excellent article, great thoughts.

I think I’ll rate amazon books by their cover now. Thanks.

I would rather work in the 37 signals office. I’d actually be able to think and be inspired there.

How your office looks sometimes isn’t that important. How you think and whether you’re happy at being in that surrounding is the crucial part. I mean who would be able to think if you’re not happy and free.

I think both of them are just similar as they both have the same business objective.

As a freelancer I spend three days of the week working from my home office and two days a week working at my desk at a company.

My home office is more in the zappos vein, the walls are full of pictures and photos and my desk is usually hovering on the right side of being messy. It’s cluttered and a little disorganised but it’s comfortable.

My desk at the workplace is immaculately clean and tidy. Most desks there are more like Zappos, even the director. The whole office in fact is so busy that it just never stays tidy for long, but not my desk. My desk is a haven away from the mess.

I can see the advantage in both

I like the office of Zappos..the thoughts in the article are great….

Really, offices? Kinda says something about our industry.

I spent the first half of my career setting up contact centres in numerous countries, the latter half working in something more like start-up environments. So hopefully I’ve got some perspective on the reason for the differences between both.

Firstly Zappos. It’s no doubt a great company to work for, the contact centres I’d setup were regularly voted the best places to work which is highly usual for that sector. They’re usually drab and lifeless places, where people are essentially chained to their desk by a headset. Toilet breaks often need to be cleared with a manager first, you need to literally clock in and out each day, and to top it all off most of your time is spent trying to calm down angry people who are calling to complain about something. The staff really are fighting on the front line and they have a hell of a task to stay happy and motivated about what they do because at the end of the day, it’s a pretty sucky job. The solution to that? Make everything else fun. The workplace and the surroundings have to work as a distraction from the other negative impacts on their job. Some autonomy to decorate their environment creates an outlet for expression in a role that is otherwise heavily regimented and scripted.

Compare that to the average life of a developer, most of us actively love the work we do. Writing code, producing something people get to use, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with it. Jason is on record as saying (paraphrasing here) that interruptions are rude, you’re basically saying whatever I want is more important than whatever you’re doing. Mental state and flow is important to a developer, distractions are preferable kept to a minimum, and that includes the environmental ones. It’s no surprise that their office reflects that, and I think it does so for good reason.

I think it’s just two companies servicing everyones innate desire to be just a little bit creative in the best way they can. For one it’s in the environment they create, the other it’s the work they produce.

I would never like to work at the Zappos office – I would get distracted. 37signals is much more my cup of tea – it might be because of the Scandinavian roots that I share with DHH.

very thoguth provoking post and I think there’s plenty of arguments to go both ways, but it does appear that the 37 signals team are way more invested as individuals in their company than the “employees” at Zappos which probably outnumber the 37 signals guys 1 – 100.

At the end of the day, both of these approaches could provide similar results depending on how the people in those respective spaces react or settle in those environments. Different strokes for different folks. personally I’d go for a mix of the 2, super cool & minimal with a hint of individualism.

Just looking at that pic of the Zappos office made me feel anxious, I doubt I could work in a space like that, but then I work from home and don’t have top share my space with someone who loves stuffed animals

the two headquarters are very different.

Pixar gives their new hires a budget to allow them to decorate their space. Pixar studios is a pretty awesome creative environment.