Silicon Valley Visit
From the 10th to 16th November, I was working in Silicon Valley with a global IT company based in San Jose. I’d been quite excited about the visit for a few weeks, both because I’d get to visit one of my favourite cities (San Francisco) and because it was my first visit to the valley and Microsofs Silicon Valley Campus.
Despite its high-tech reputation, I’d heard Silicon Valley was basically a huge trading estate. I’d say it was more like a mixture of small businesses, light industry and massive corporate HQs. It felt far smaller than I’d expected with many companies on the list below within a 10 mile area.
Driving around, I mentally ticked off the companies I’d seen;
- Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale
- Marvell HQ, Santa Clara
- Atheros HQ, Santa Clara
- Citrix, Santa Clara
- NetApp HQ, Sunnyvale
- Cisco HQ, San Jose
- Juniper HQ, Sunnyvale
- Motorola, Sunnyvale
- Intel HQ, Santa Clara
- McAfee HQ, Santa Clara
- Broadcom, Sunnyvale
- Oracle HQ, Redwood
- LinkedIn HQ, Mountain View
- Google HQ, Mountain View
- HP HQ, Palo Alto
- Apple HQ, Cupertino
- Xerox PARC, Palo Alto
The most impressive HQs were Google and Oracle (seen from US101 rather than up close), the least impressive being Apple; for such a blue-chip company I’d expected a more open campus rather than a few multi-story office blocks.
I really liked Palo Alto and driving round PARC, it had a nice rural feel to it compared with the rest of the valley. It would be a great experience to live and work in Silicon Valley for a few years.