Day 4: Microsoft and lots of rain!

01/11/2018

Day 4, and the Seattle weather only gets wetter! We had a much earlier start today, leaving our stay at 7:30 for a very rainy walk to our bus stop. However, we missed our first bus ride by only a minute, and stood in the medium rain for another 10 minutes, watching the Seattle traffic, as we waited for the next bus!

Once the bus arrived, we had a 30 minute ride to our stop, which we forgot to get off at! We then got off at the next stop and walked for another 30 minutes to our destination. As unfortunate as this may seem, we got the opportunity to walk through a large portion of the Microsoft campus, which is both beautiful and jaw-dropping. It can be safely said that this was the most impressive set of building belonging to one company that we have seen thus far.

Only a few minutes late, we arrived at the Envisioning Center, where we got to explore a room with futuristic technical design. This area had new equipment and technology that could possibly be incorporated into the daily lives of many within the next 3-7 years. As amazing as some of this equipment was, it was also very out-of-the-ordinary, and definitely seems like an innovative challenge for the future.

We then took a much shorter walk to the next building, where we stayed the rest of the day. This building was the first of the 4 main buildings built first on the Microsoft campus. This led to a day of insightful meetings with employees with various experiences, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. For example, our first guest was a code developer who innovates the code that programmers use today. Another guest was a leading developer with artificial intelligence, and another was a marketing specialist who had been with Microsoft for over 15 years!

Some of the major takeaways from these meetings had to do with the setup of a workplace: understanding, communicating, and unifying within the teams and within the company can make the workplace far more efficient. We learned about code design, and why C# is such a loved and used programming language today. Some basic thoughts behind marketing decisions were also considered. I also learned about what it is like to stay with a company for a very long time, and to see projects come and go, and how much luck and faith have to do with how every person ends up on their career path.

That's about it today! Visiting a small startup tomorrow, before giving my own book report to the group!

Erik Nelson