Of Office Moves and Buildings
ScottGu has an interesting post today about office moves and building lore on the Microsoft Campus. We in the VC group used to be in the building Scott's in now but now we're across the street in building 41. In my 8+ years at Microsoft I've been in 6 different buildings.
I started off in developer support which wasn't situated in the Microsoft campus itself but rather in downtown Bellevue in a tall building (Well, it was 21 stories. In some places I guess that isn't considered very tall...) called Bellevue Place. This was my favorite MS location, even though we worked out of cubicles instead of offices, because I had a corner cubicle on the 14th floor. Out of one window I had a view of the Cascade mountains and out of the other I had a view of Mount Ranier. It almost made it worth the burden of having to be on the phones at 6:00am...
When I joined the product group, I moved to building 25. This was my favorite campus building, even though I never had a window office (a very big status symbol at MS...) there. They had great lounge areas where people could gather to collaborate. These lounge areas were big enough for the whole team to hold their shiprooms in. One nice memory I have from building 25 was JimSpr, ChrisBe, JanFal, and NenadS holing up in one of the lounge areas for whole weeks inventing ATL...
After a couple of years in building 25, they moved us over to the original 4 campus buildings. This was kind of cool from a historical perspective but confusing at first. There were 4 more or less identical x-shaped buildings that connected to each other. Since every hall looked identical it could be a challenge if you had a meeting in one of the other three buildings. I remember some buildings had handmade paper signs pointing out directions to important locations (like the build lab)... I spent time in 2 of these original 4 buildings: buildings 2 and 4.
Next stop was building 42. I liked this building but not as much as building 25 - not as much personality. It didn't feel like we were on campus because this building was situated across the busy street (156th ave) from the rest of campus. Building 42 did have nice lounge areas like building 25, although smaller.
Now we're in building 41. Not much to say about this building - it's feels like it's just a building. No lounge areas and somewhat conference-room-challenged since we've had to commandeer some of the conference rooms to make communal office space. On Friday, I saw something even more strange: someone had set up a table and chair in the first floor mailroom with a phone wire coming down from the ceiling and a phone and a laptop on the table. I couldn't tell if this was a prank (people tend to do stuff like this to people when they're off on vacation) or if we're really getting that tight with office space...
10:00:19 PM 
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