Day 5:

               Today marks the second to last full day on the trip as the week winds down and we get closer to Saturday when we leave and go back home. Today we visited two major companies and they were Facebook and Apple, we got to Apple around 9:30 and stayed there until 2, while we were there we met a few different employees and one was named Jim, and his job is a consulting engineer. He told us about his background when he worked for his dad’s gas station as a kid and he also told us about the lean culture and how there are not many job titles and layers of employees. Following that we had lunch and spoke with a few other employees over lunch who gave us there stories and also we got the chance to exchange business cards. Our next stop after Apple was Facebook and before we even got to our appointment we had to deal with awful parking, there were cars parked everywhere, it was a disaster. Once we finally got in to Facebook we took a tour and Vicky was our tour guide, she took us around the campus, which looked more like a small village. The campus has a lot of things in it such as a barber shop, numerous food places and a woodshop. The campus has 8 buildings that they use for offices and they are numbered 10-18 with 13 being left out because it is unlucky. There were a few cool things at Facebook such as this brick road through this grass that lead to a coffee shop, the story is that employees would cut through the grass and destroyed the grass. Facebook’s solution was to put a brick road in and some employee painted it yellow after hours and it became the yellow brick road. Following Facebook we had a poolside with Priyanka Sharma who is the Co-Founder of WakaTime and she was very informative and gave us very good information about her company and the technology and IT parts that go into it. Overall I thought today was a successful day, my favorite trip was to Apple but the other two were good as well I thought. Tomorrow we are headed into San Francisco for the day on our final full day in the Valley.