A Visit to YSL

Yesterday, I visited YSL (Yamato Software Laboratory) at Kanagawa Perfecture. Actually it is a tour inside the Yamato Laboratory for students who are accepted to work in YSL. I applied for software developer job on December last year and received acceptance letter in early January. It was kind of late actually, because usually Japanese students would already have applied on March or April. Because of that, other accepted students already visited the YSL and I was the only who haven't joined the tour. Although I was the only student who joined yesterday tour, the visit was fun and the people in YSL were friendly.

YSL is in 4th and 5th floor. First, I met Kouda-san, the HR staff. She took me to a meeting room then gave a brief explanation about the tour. Then Okamura-san (uhmm.. I don't really remember her name) came. She is a very nice woman, and her presentation was easy to understand. I met the chief of YSL, Iwano-san in his room. We chatted about Indonesia (the location, language, etc), about Japanese youngster nowadays who lack interest in software developing. I was so nervous that I didn't ask him anything. Should have ask something because it was a rare chance to be able to talk to the chief of YSL. After meeting with Iwano-san, we went back to the meeting room and I was introduced to Akamatsu-san, my advisor, and Matsunaga-san. We had a long talk about the working enviroment, clothing code in the office, the training, lots of thing. Akamatsu-san and Matsunga-san nicely answered my question.

The last session was the tour, we went to the cafetaria. It is in the 2nd and 3rd floor. The cafetaria is so big. In the 1st floor, there are japanese room, with tatami, the short table and the sliding door. I was impressed. Wow.. japanese room, and the TRL (Tokyo Research Laboratory, other division located in the next building) also have a refreshing room with tatami. Then we went to TRL and I could see cubicles with high walls (compared to the cubicles in YSL) blocking our eyes from seeing anything inside. The reason for the high wall is to help the workers concentrate in their work. We went back to YSL ground and went to Tivoli office room. I could see PCs, servers, printers, etc. The network inside this room is not connected to the outside, because the PCs are for testing and running experiments. It was really hot inside the room, maybe because of the large number of the PCs in the room. Next we went to Akamatsu-san's cubicle. We had a nice chat there and then the tour was over.