Day Five: Apple, Facebook and WakaTime

Today was a very busy day from an early morning at Apple, leading us to go off to head to Facebook and concluding our day with WakaTime. Each of these companies have very different objectives, but they share the same passions. When we arrive at Apple, we arrived at a sub-site that is located just one mile from the famous main campus (office,) where Tim Cook and others are located. We learn that some of the employees at Apple believe that its better to plan day by day rather than years down the road. The message of trying new things and expanding out is embraced. Even though some of the employees don't come from technical backgrounds, they can adapt to fit into a group at Apple. The biggest message that I personally took away from talking with Apple employees was, "Be open to trying new opportunities!" As Apple was a pleasure to tour and meet with employees'; our next stop at Facebook was crazy. 

As we showed up to Facebook, the parking lot was a sea of cars. When we finally parked, we walked into what seemed like a normal office with a massive large door. As we opened the door after getting to check in, we found a campus that was beyond belief! The campus had almost everything you could think of, from a coffee shop, wood making shop and so much more! Facebook has a lot of cool features and workers in open rooms to show that all are even rather than no one is higher than others. As our tour of Facebook came to an end, we headed back to the hotel to meet WakaTime.

WakaTime is a company that started from a poly-science major from Stanford. WakaTime is a plug in that is used in most text editors, and it can pick up on almost all languages. We learned that the best way to gain support is by having strong trust among people. The biggest risk that any company can take is the risks of uncertainty. WakaTime is a small company that makes its programs open source by has some great success with the plugins that it develops. Overall, after all these meetings with all of the companies that we met with; I think the message of risk is reward was a common factor among all companies big or small.