Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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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It depends ... is "more than 12 feet off the ground" high enough for them to hang themselves?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
While I can appreciate an employer that attempts to provide means for employees to get meaningful breaks if their shifts are going to be long and arduous, I more appreciate employers that don't compel their employees to work far over a standard 40 hour workweek.
Admittedly my perspectives on labor tend to fall toward the employee-protection side, but unless one is involved in the corporate-level decisions of a company I don't think that one should be salaried-exempt. As far as I'm concerned, end-workers that don't manage anyone else and middle-managers that are provided directives to the enforce upon their teams without really providing executive-level steering of the company should be paid overtime when they cross 40 hours. The whole point of being salaried-exempt originally was for those who ran companies and had a strong financial stake in those companies, rather than being workers paid for their production output. The modern white-collar job and other office-based jobs can muddy the distinction a bit, but it's pretty easy to identify when a supervisor or director sets policy, versus merely enforces or interprets policy set by someone above them, to the best of their abilities. To make an analogy to the world of education, in such a system teachers and department-heads that also teach would not be salaried-exempt. Those with "Superintendent" in their title would be salaried-exempt. Principals are the only place it gets muddy, but generally they are there to interpret and enforce policy, so they too would probably not be salaried-exempt, though that may depend on how much autonomy and authority they have over the campus, and how they have to answer to those above them.
Anyway, back to the tech-employee, if an employee is not expected to regularly and consistently work more than 40 hours a week, then these diversionary tactics are not generally needed, because the employee can generally concentrate and make efforts for four hours at a stretch with a brief lunch after the first chunk of the day. It's only when the employee essentially lives there, has essentially moved-in for the vast majority of their waking-hours, that it becomes necessary to provide the comforts or home or other diversions to allow them to thrive without going crazy. And when one considers the amount of time wasted in these diversions (think of the Startup-stereotypical ping-pong or fooseball table) it's pretty likely that the employer isn't getting a whole lot more than those 40 hours per week in productivity anyway.
To look at my own experience, what would benefit me the most is if my employer would reduce the number of lines of communication (landline, cell phone, e-mail, SMS, spark, jabber are simply too many and simply monitoring for incoming communications requires too much attention, pick two or three at most), would set specific time blocks for meetings so that employees are not unnecessarily disrupted in workflow and so bosses are available for consult, and would create a policy on when it is and when it is not acceptable to interrupt someone while they're working I would find my productivity increased without having to work any more hours. When I get interrupted it takes me some time to get back on-track again. Being interrupted for something important is one thing, but being interrupted for trivial things or for things that others should already know how to do are other matters entirely.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No, definitely not Cisco/SysCo. I'm fairly certain the GP was talking about NetGear and NetGeer, a company founded by a guy named Sir Thomas Geer to distribute low-cost hairnets to school cafeterias across the country.
[Quickly creates the Wikipedia entry... annnnnd done!]
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.