Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3 | Hacker News Reader

Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3

my.matterport.com

71 pointsuticus40 comments

Not much I miss about working at Microsoft, except that everyone had an office, and if you had even a couple of years of seniority, you had that office to yourself. The window offices required 5 years' seniority when I joined, and when I had 5 years' seniority, window offices required 10 years' seniority...

Even Microsoft has gone open office now, though.

When I joined even college hires had an office. I miss old Microsoft badly.

That brings back memories. Seeing that all too familiar office layout, furniture, scribbled notes on whiteboards, and whatnot somehow evokes both homesickness and PTSD at the same time.

The offices were nice though. Back in the early days, it didn't take that much seniority to get a single person office and a little more to get an office with a window.

This triggers all kinds of feelings, I actually had a pretty good time working there. It's one of those things that rush by like a rollercoaster when it's all happening, and you can't really grab a hold of it all. What stays, many many years later, is nothing but random snapshot memories, like a JPEG that gets saved and recompressed over and over again for the rest of your life. So this actually refreshed those moments a bit, seeing it like this. Instantly worried I had forgotten where I parked my car, which happened all the time back then, when you'd jump from meetings between buildings. I keep hoping to be allowed some kind of walk-through again, maybe, if I ever get back up there.

Did you develop anything of note while you were there? What was developed at this building? I wonder if the building design had any influence on how certain products turned out.

I didn't work for Microsoft but had a family member work there (I work for a well known payroll company thats the same corporate drab). These images are giving me PTSD and depression because my current arrangement of working remotely with a nice monitor and chair with a laid back team will eventually be gone one day and I will be thrown back into the fire. Im only 10 years into my career having tinkered with computers since 6 years old and I don't know how people get through decades of working in places like this. :/

This is my dream office setup - small pods of developers where you can close the door if you need to focus. Kit the room out how you like it.

Especially useful for phone calls -- don't need to hunt for an empty phone booth or book a room.

I used to have my own office working for an older industrial company. Now that I work for a tech company, it's all open concept. I have no problem focusing, but taking calls, especially private ones, is a pain.

"Private personal space + collaboration friendly areas to be available as needed" has been the recommendation of basically every study I've seen on how to maximize software developer productivity.

But bean counters kill that idea right quick.

> when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in.

I worked in building 6 for a while. That was frustrating because the two halves of the building were mirror images. If I had to go to the other side of the building for a meeting, I got disoriented and thought I knew the way back to my office, but I kept getting it wrong. It's like the Upside Down.

Microsoft campuses were always impossible to navigate. The buildings are numbered in the Japanese style, i.e. chronologically.

Why not number buildings on a battleship grid? Building B6 must be adjacent to A6 and B7, as opposed to building 40 being adjacent to 27. Why not prefix the office numbers of an X-wing building with cardinal directions? If you see office N202, and you need office W107, head to the core, down the stairs, and one hallway to the left.

Not to mention that some people always used the golf course code names for clusters of buildings, too... which were never "official" so there wasn't even any signage or anything to refer to for those. I remember being pointed to a pile of "stuff new people ought to know but HR won't tell you" on some random share in NTDEV when I started and it had a map with those marked on it.

The main Redmond campus was shared with other tech companies originally.

Microsoft grew outwards from the original 4, then 6, buildings. I guess they didn't think it'd be worthwhile to rename the buildings once they expanded beyond 4 or 6.

116/117/118/119 were just like that: rotations and reflections of each other. So confusing!

The blog post is right that the double x-wings were the worst. I _never_ got the hang of 9 the whole time I sat there.

Another exasperating thing is that the signs on the wall that were supposed to provide directions by listing which office number range was down which direction were somehow of no help whatsoever. I'd be looking for office number xxx or whatever and following the signs and somehow they'd never take me to the right hallway. People can smirk and say "skill issue" if they want but I swear it's true. Judging by the number of other people who had problems navigating those buildings, I wasn't alone.

Similarly, buildings 40 and 41 were (at least pre-remodel) roughly mirror images of each other. Roughly a week after moving from 41 to 40 -- long enough to start navigating based on "caveman memory" but not long enough to override a year's worth of previous memories -- I accidentally went into the women's restroom instead of the men's because they too were mirrored.

I definitely went into the wrong restroom a couple of times after an office move to the opposite side of building 9.

Building 16 & 17 had the same problem.

After working late, I decided to cut through building 17. I had to wash my hands so I went to the men's washroom, assuming the same layout in 17 as in 16.

Hmmm... They painted the washroom walls pink for some reason.

Oh. They've got a condom dispenser in the washroom?!

Ooooh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. That's NOT a condom dispenser!

I looked around wildly for any indications besides the dispenser of which washroom I was in. Quickly scrambled for the exit and looked at the door on my way out to discover that building 17 did NOT have the same exact layout as building 16.

Mental note etched in my brain forever...

I worked in Building 2 and it was my best job ever. Loved every second of it. They knew the need for thinking time, hence individual offices. Buildings 1-8 were in a wooded area with trails threaded through the area. Gorgeous in any weather but especially snow days. Jogging there in the snow was gorgeous, and of course they had showers so you could change.

Relevant Blogpost: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250708-00/?p=11...

The original Microsoft building is in Albuquerque. Maybe this is the first one in Washington?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/historic-microsoft-plaqu...

The title is referring to the fact that the building shown is the original Building 3. It has since been demolished, and now there's a new Building 3.

And there's finally a Building 7, which I guess could be a way to determine when an ex-ms employee worked at the main campus.

see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080401-00/?p=22... and https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250401-00/?p=11...

No it is not, an earlier WA building (not necessarily the earliest) was across from the Burgermaster on SR520/Northup Way. I think they meant it's the original MS building 3. As far as I know there is no 'new' building 3.

There's a new building 3 as part of the East campus redevelopment

https://maps.app.goo.gl/o4fLxGArs6GAhxgE9

The first in WA was directly adjacent to the Burgermaster on Northup. The next set of buildings was nearly directly across 520 to the south.

For collectors and archivists out there, just in case you would like to keep a local copy of the walkthrough: https://github.com/rebane2001/matterport-dl

I wonder how long we’ll start seeing demos like this with just Gaussian splatting and seemless transitions / infinite exploration

RE: Snack room/Kitchen on second floor (near the testing lab double room with yellow floor)

The soda pop selection has been reduced since I was there.

No multiple root beers, no orange/cream soda pop, no Fresca.

Not a sign of Sprite! Crikey.

Only Minute Maid Light Lemonade?! No regular version? Are the employees in this building on a diet?

At least they got rid of the spicy V-8. They shouldn't decide drink availability at company meetings.

Bloody hell.

No 7-up either. Double bloody hell. DEI for soda pop!!!

Blog post with a pic of typical MS soda pop fridges in the 90s/early 2000s - https://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/04/tour-of-microsofts-m...

When they still knew how to build offices…

What was the need for reinforced (wire mesh) internal glazing?

The doors had locks (at least if you had a need for one), so I suppose this is simple security. Not that you can't hop the drop ceiling or just go through the drywall with less noise and mess.

Possibly for fire rating. Wire mesh glass was common on fire rated doors to stairways and such, although there's other ways to accomplish that now.

Edit: I had some trouble with the site, but figured it out enough to see that the offices have big doors, and then a window next to them that's mesh glass. Some of the doors have fire door tags (although you can't read them, and I only found one), and most don't. I suspect there was a code requirement for some of the offices to have fire rated construction, thus the fire door, and then you need the window and the drywall also fire rated. Other offices probably didn't need that, but maybe they used the same glass for everything for consistency.

But, I'm not an architect or an appropriate engineer, my spouse holds a bachelor's degree in architecture, so I've got some knowledge by osmosis.

Thanks. It seems such glazing was common in American 1970's era construction as a way to evenly distribute across the pane and into the frame the heat from a fire on one side of the window. This extends the time before the glass shatters, which once shattered allows flames/smoke through. It has commonly been misunderstood to be "stronger" glass, an overloaded term that might have some applicability to fire resistance, but has given people the wrong idea about impact resistance. Glazing with embedded wires is much less impact resistant whilst also posing additional safety risk to humans impacting the glass. When humans attempt to pull themselves out of glass they've impacted, the wires hold sharp glass shards in place causing even more severe injuries.[1]

It looks like all adjoining offices on the exterior of the building are single fire zones, with stairwells at either end of each zone. Internal offices seem to be divided into fire zones too (e.g. 6x2 rooms as a single zone) with use of the odd internal slab-to-slab wall that would possibly be fire resistant.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Lmwl7y-9M

I love that the black trash cans say "Microsoft" on them, for some reason.

They had to compete with Apple

These were taken between 2014 and 2018, because I seem to recall that the "accent walls" were painted in fall of 2014 and the buildings were emptied for demolition in 2018.

Nice: https://postimg.cc/BLTv558B

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