Microsoft@Redmond

Well, we didn't get the opportunity to get into any of the Microsoft buildings in the first 2 days and it got us really restless...we had seen them from outside ofcourse, because Redmond is filled with them. Redmond is a small village in Washington state and I should say it is "filled with" Microsoft. To my knowledge there are atleast 115 buildings there...these are not huge ones though, each would have a maximum of two floors, the exceptions being the buildings containing offices of Bill and Steve which are 4 storied ones. Since Washington area is prone to earthquakes, there are limits on the number of floors a building can have.

The buildings are all surprisingly similar from outside (even our new campus at Hyderabad has the same exteriors), but very distinct on the interi0rs. Each building has a theme for the interior decorations. Ours was Paintings, and the walls were filled with illustrated paintings. JP's building theme was customers, they would be filled with life-size "cut-outs" of different customers of Microsoft, one would be a German customer, explaining his features, like "Marc was born in Germany and is an accountant, he has been using Windows 98 for a long time and is thinking of moving over to XP. But of-late he has been hearing a lot of stuff about something called Linux. He is an advanced user of Excel 98 and..." I am not doing a good job of reconstructing the profile here..:(...anyway it would be focussed on a German customer's perspective on software.

There is no concept of cubicles here and everyone from the lowest level programmer to the CEO gets a cabin for himself/herself. We saw cabins decorated in every wild way possible. In one cabin we saw some 200 cans of pepsi, coke etc piled neatly one on top of another to form a man-sized pyramid. Some people had comfortable sofas installed on their office. We saw a few people who used to sit on the floor outside their offices working on their laptop..couldnt figure out why...maybe they liked it that way.

I and JP were lucky to get our own cubicles all for ourselves since others had to share an office due to lack of space. But I got so bored sitting all alone day long that when Arun came over I made him share the office with me.

The kitchen deserves a special mention, the principle seemed to be anything liquid is free and everything else is charged...there was a really huge refrigirator housing hundereds of cans of coke, pepsi, chocolate milk (my favourite ofcourse:)), sprite and a number of American drinks like Dr. Pepper (it has a real horrible taste) and canned fruit juices like apple, cranberry, grape etc. There was also a pay-with-a-coin style parlour which housed stuff like chips chocolates and everything to make you fat (and people blamed me for getting fat after the trip!!!!)

People who were really busy (or atleast pretended to be) put a sticker outside their offices saying "DND-Email Only". I really liked the way in which people respected other's privacy. Even my mentor (an Indian) would get my consent before setting up a meeting or even for coming over casually to meet me).

There is a huge ground where football and cricket(!!!) were the favourite sports. We played quite a bit there. Apart from these, things that deserve a passing mention are the continuous shuttles which carried people around these 100-odd buildings, huge (really huge) car parks below the buildings, the fooseball table(which we managed to get here as well), the state a hall in Building 34 (Bill Gates's office is in this building!!) was after some beer-bash (it was just like what a director would love to show if he wanted to protray some "Saraaya-kadai" fight scene in Usilampatti-really nasty and last but definitely not the least my own office overlooking the street and the beautiful drops of rain dripping on the glass every time there was a drizzle:).