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Microsoft Employees Can Now Work In Treehouses (cnbc.com)
Microsoft's campus now features three outdoor treehouses for its employees. An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
More than 12 feet off the ground, the treehouses feature charred-wood walls, skylights, at least one gas fireplace, Wi-Fi and hidden electrical outlets. Employees can even grab a bite at an outdoor extension of the indoor cafeteria. The "more Hobbit than HQ" treehouses are designed by Pete Nelson of the TV show "Treehouse Masters" and are part of Microsoft's growing "outdoor districts..." The company touts the professional benefits of working in nature -- greater creativity, focus and happiness -- but honestly, the treehouses are just plain cool.
Microsoft touts a Harvard physician who believes nature "stimulates reward neurons in your brain. It turns off the stress response, which means you have lower cortisol levels, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and improved immune response." There's a short video on the "Working at Microsoft" channel on YouTube, but I'm curious what Slashdot readers think about working outdoors. Or, in a tree...
Microsoft touts a Harvard physician who believes nature "stimulates reward neurons in your brain. It turns off the stress response, which means you have lower cortisol levels, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and improved immune response." There's a short video on the "Working at Microsoft" channel on YouTube, but I'm curious what Slashdot readers think about working outdoors. Or, in a tree...
Working in trees will not help that.
How soon before someone gets fired for mentioning "getting wood"? Or just plain ol' hijinks in the back of the "wood shed"?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I find this trend of treating workers in technology like babies insulting and wasteful. I am not interested in beer in the workplace, I am not interested in replacing staircases with slides, or with play spaces. I'd much rather have a quiet, private office where I can work without getting bothered constantly by people who don't understand what I'm doing. And competent coworkers, while I'm dreaming.
# != # || whatever.
I'd absolutely love to work outside in a tree house (weather and insects permitting). I'd also like to try working from a house boat. While the health benefits of nature aren't exactly a "new" discovery, I'm happy to see Microsoft recognizing it by giving their employees this opportunity. I hope this experiment works out well.
Part of me thinks this is gimmicky and stupid.
The rest of me wants to work in one, or look into converting my home office into a tree house, complete with a rope ladder and a secret password.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
:point-up:
Someone make a sign.
Even if the treehouses will end up as a fad, they are trying to change their mindset.
Are they children or childish or have not grown up?
Would have loved it :-)
They need bananas now.
"Hey, we're having problems getting folks to work for us - we interview folks, and they listen, but then always seem to take jobs with other companies. Aren't we cool anymore?"
"Well, we could offer better salaries, more influence over project development, or maybe offer a more sane work-life balance..."
"Tree Houses! That's it! Tree houses - those are just - well, they're just cool, aren't they? Yes siree- tree houses! That'll get all the cool kids!"
This will definitely bring MS back to relevance.
But this is the Trumpverse isn't it. The new normal. Mad as hatters.
Ballmer is out now, and Microsoft has "turned around".
But this? Is there *actually* hope for Microsoft in the long run when they do things like this? Real devs should be able to work in refrigerator sized cardboard boxes in a parking lot and work under the duress of having a pitchfork shoved through the walls if the keyboard is idle for more than 30 seconds. At least that's what my boss told me.
My initial reaction is that this is simply to skirt around zoning ordinances and property taxes.
It reminds me of a really neat property outside of town we were drooling at before moving back here a few years ago. The place had a very awesome looking "elevated" guest house about the same distance off the ground a tree house would have been, and it was declared a tree house instead of a guest house to keep the tax bill down from what we could determine.
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Good. That means the stream of willing morons working for MS may be drying up. In actual reality MS has never been cool, but there are far too many people that mistake having a lot of money as a really positive quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... but rather walking around on a sight-seeing tour through the "tree house".
Once they actually work, they will need to look at a screen, where they would see the same awful MicroSoft crap-ware as in so many conventional offices.
I'd prefer working in a soul-less cube of concrete, if in return on my screen there was a decent operating system.
Google, Microsoft and others are famously "all-inclusive" workplaces designed to continue the college campus atmosphere. The question is whether treehouse work spaces are just a by-product of the tech bubble and trying to attract people with interesting personalities, or whether Millenials really prefer working in these conditions.
Microsoft is famous for giving its developers very nice office space and very little reason to leave campus. If I were a 20-something computer science grad, this might have some appeal to me. I probably wouldn't have much of a life outside of work, my apartment would be small and lack all the amenities of "campus life," etc. Problem is, once those 20-somethings reach their 30s or so, a fraction of them are going to have families and lives outside of work.
The only problem is what to do with the grown-ups who don't want to work 100 hour weeks anymore. If Microsoft is simply saying they're not welcome, then they will run into maturity issues down the line once every large MS-focused corporate workload is running in Azure. Maybe they're banking on keeping the fraction of 30+ workers who will continue working crazy hours. When you think about it it makes sense...app development and infrastructure is so abstracted now that all of he truly geeky CS people are going to gravitate towards the OS and cloud providers to keep all the real hardware and software living under all those layers and wrappers going. Everyone else is going to be a "developer" gluing JavaScript libraries together.
That work area didn't look like it could be fully accessible to people with disabilities. I wonder if runs afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Pay people better and give them offices. With windows not the OS. Letâ(TM)s be adults and not pine for childish toys at work.
(No, didn't RTFA)
Google says there's 30k-40k employees at MS' Redmond HQ - how many of them gets to even see this thing?
Microsoft employees _can_ work in a variety of environments by they rarely do.
Back in the Ballmer years the parking lots rarely filled up before 10 and started emptying at 4. Add an extra long lunch and the fact that most people's days are filled with meetings and almost nothing got done.
...they can do it literally.
Aren't the relaxing effects of the tree house completely nullified by using a stressful OS such as Windows?!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
The treehouse my son and his friends built 15 years ago turned into a twisted mass of splintered wood. (We took it down last year as requested by our insurance co.)
For many years I worked in an IBM building that had a nice balcony, but the doors to access it were locked in 1993 ... when Gerstner started parting the company middle management suddenly had reason to fear the balcony being put to other purpose.
but we're doing this crap? Two new guys we onboarded Sept 1 are still sitting on the floor in a hallway. Also, since I'm above a certain weight, when I started here in Feb, I wasn't allowed to sit in any of the desk chairs. I had to wait three weeks for one of the "fat chairs."
It was done in the 90s by The Upright Citizens Brigade. Google, er Bing it!
thanks to the MS monopoly
Memo to: All HQ employees
From: tcook@apple.com
Subject: Food and Drink Policy
Just reminding everyone that there's no food or drink permitted outside the cafeteria and designated break areas. In the past week we've had over 50 coffee spills on the (Apple white) carpet. Also remember that fingerprints detract from the beautiful views from our custom windows and it is very time consuming for the cleaning staff to remove them. And remember to use the shoe covers provided at all entrances during inclement weather.
Also, remember that the pet policy is in full effect -many of you have heard about the "incident" outside Jony's office and that is unacceptable in my opinion no matter who's dog it was. So going forward no pets, no exceptions.
Together we can all do our part to keep the HQ in good shape for years to come.
thanks.
Tim.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
if you can even get a job at Microsoft. These days it seems you have to live in India or be an H1-B visa to get anywhere ....
At Google, for awhile I was very near a common area we called "the wine cave", because one section was decorated with the ends of wine barrels. Initially, it was a nice place to go chill out for a bit in the middle of the day. Over time, though, as employee density kept being ratcheted up, it became a campground for visitors and for locals who were trying to get some time away from their neighbors. So eventually it became overcrowded during the bulk of the workday, completely negating any value it previously added.
I can completely see why a workplace would not optimize to make your workspace so perfect that you never wanted to leave it. That's probably too far past the point of high-cost-low-returns. But if people's working space sucks to the point where alternative venues become a requirement, you are doing it wrong, and it's unlikely that an employer like that would then turn around and provide enough alternative spaces to meet the actual need.
I'm a Trump-voting, gun-owning, liberal-bashing guy who lives in Tennessee and works as an IT administrator. My first instinct is to make fun of snowflakes who need this in order to function at work, but after a few seconds of thinking about it, I'd love to spend my day at work in a fucking treehouse.
build a fun environment. I guess they're stealing Google tactics now too. If people realized that most modern roller coaster parks ran Windows, they'd be a whole lot more scared.
After all, you would have to subhuman to want to work for MS.
wood is made out of trees, think about it, ill give you all the time you need
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
where your office is on a hallway with tiled walls and linoleum floors, and where the sounds of slamming doors from classrooms, offices occupied by multiple grad students and a conference room with a particularly balky door SLAM, SLAM, SLAM seep over the transom through the false ceiling for the A/C retrofit.
Classroom instructors insist on closing their doors -- actually, I would prefer to hear the ah-ums of the disfluent instructor teaching multiple sections of a required technical writing course or the stentorian voice of the guy teaching 20 bored grad students clumsy separation-of-variables methods to describe plasma waves under unrealistically simplified geometries to the SLAM, SLAM of students leaving and reentering those classrooms during a 50 minute class period to take bathroom breaks. And then when class lets out, there is a burst of SLAM, SLAM, SLAM, SLAM because pushing the door against the damper to activate the feature to hold the door open is beyond the skill level of Engineering undergraduate students.
Working evenings or weekends is not any better because students claim the classrooms for their study groups by closing the doors, and of course one member of the group has to leave for a bathroom or snack break every 10 minutes, multiplied by the number of classroom on that hallway - SLAM, SLAM.
Every once-in-a-while someone from Facilities comes to adjust the ancient door closers to make the slam phase less energetic and to lube the ancient door knobs and bolts to quiet them, but I guess they go out of adjustment. The door nearest me has had a closer replaced with a modern version with adjustment instructions on the Web, but it requires a special sized Allen wrench that I don't yet have; the ancient closers the size of fire hydrants are a complete mystery as there are no adjustment instructions on the Internet, and there is a sense that if one "went at" one, a screw would come loose and a puddle of door-closer oil would form on the linoleum.
I would welcome a tree house, a dark, windowless (and quiet!) basement, anything over this.
During warm weather from April through mid-October (sigh) my favorite place to work is on my front porch, where I'm surrounded by trees, birds, squirrels, and (for part of the summer) fireflies. I've also gone on retreats where I stayed in a remote cabin up north for a week, and got some really good work done there. It isn't for everyone, but neither is being locked in a dark room with no windows.
That would be nice. All Microsoft products spy on you forcibly in staggering ways. The Windows 10 UI is idiotic and NOT intuitive at all.
I hope the tree houses help reverse stupidity and evilness that has been built in to Microsoft products.