Went in one of the new break-out rooms at work today. These have been popping up across the site over the last week or two, but I’d not got round to going to have a look before.
They’ve got comfy chairs and sofas, coffee tables with newspapers and computing magazines, plasma screen TVs, and a small kitchen with fridge, microwave, hot water, and posh coffee machines. I like the idea of these rooms – more than just a useful alternative to the cafeteria as a space to make our own food. They’re a place to get away from our desk and take time out to bounce ideas off each other. More importantly, they reinforce that our job is about more than sitting at our desk, keeping our heads down and quietly churning out code.
Lifehacker had a link a couple of weeks ago to an interesting webpage about “cool workplaces”, which talks about some more innovative approaches to making your work place an exciting place. One of these was (as they admit, a little predictably!) the very cool Google offices.
Okay, so our new rooms aren’t quite in the same league as the Googleplex (how cool would that be?!), but add them to the stuff we’ve already got on site like foosball, tennis courts, sports hall, gym, and so on, and we’re pretty lucky.
I wrote it to run in the background, and update itself once a minute. This raised an interesting question – what to do with the handle to Outlook.