Meta SF Team Building
A Meta SF Team Building event on Spear Street near the Embarcadero was a huge success.
Software engineers from the Threads team had a great time building and battling robots!
Four teams competed to build the Robot Battles 1 robot faster than each other, and for a world record. The winning team, pictured above, finished in an amazingly fast time of 34:30 (thirty four minutes and 30 seconds)!
The battles were a high scoring affair with multiple robot flips and dozens of balloons popped. We went for about 12 rounds before concluding with a “last-bot-standing” finale and anointing a battle champion!
Our venue was somewhere between the 37th and 40th floors, with floor-to-ceiling windows allowing spectacular views of Meta’s original downtown offices, attached to the Salesforce roof top park, above the transportation center. The building has a novel, interesting, and somewhat controversial elevator protocol, whereby the elevator only stops every third floor. If you wish to travel to a non-third floor, you will be taking the stairs.
The purpose of the protocol is to alleviate congestion on the elevators. I liked the concept, especially since I had just read an article on my Apple News feed about the healthy benefits of walking “X number of steps” per day. Essentially, more steps is better, with 10,000 steps per day being the non-scientific holy grail, but with significant health improvements for walking 3,000 to 4,000 steps per day. A few staircase walks would get you close!
Food centers are located on the same floors as the elevator stops, so you are never more than 2 floors from food or from an elevator.
Overall, I heard rumblings in the stairwell from some folks about the inconvenience, and some confusion on “middle floors as to “where is the coffee?”, but also folks commented on how much better the elevators function, so my impression was that it was controversial but also possibly working?
A huge thank you to Meta for inviting us to downtown SF for an inspiring Robot Build and Battle team building event!
