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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...
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.
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.