A visit to Jolla's headquarters?

Is there an R&D office in Helsinki?

I like the general idea. But you already mentioned it yourself: What do you expect? Jolla is a software company. The prototypes they have will not be shown to you. The rest is desks, computers, a meeting room, a kitchen and a coffee machine. And half of the employees probably work from home (or similar). Go to your city office, it will be equally exciting :-P (no offense to anyone intended)

For the record (open source) software companies do open-doors events - for example here, Red Hat Czech:

https://openhousecz.redhat.com/

As for what to show to people, there are a couple things:

• presentations about the interesting projects the company and individual teams do
• coding and bug hunting competitions
• general workplace and it features (not just desks, but any interesting additional amenities)
• present any interesting not-directly work related projects people in the office might be involved in (I & couple colleagues will be for example presenting the local 3D printing lab during upcoming RH OpenHouse in Brno)
• HR can present open positions to the attendees (open door events are apparently pretty important for hiring new people)

It can also generate some PR by advertising the open doors even in appropriate channels & venues (such as universities, tech incubators, etc.)

Looks to me like ideals from the communists or socialist era. Not that it was bad, but someone asks first what is the benefit of such event, because, this would mean, that productive hours are spent on artificial goal without any real benefit. Lets say Jolla allocates 10 people and each earns 800/day and you need 2 days - 1 to prepare and 1 to present ... will such event bring back more than 16000 invested? I doubt.

regards

Hello deplotes Interesting calculations...indeed. That would be quite a show already if 10 Jolla employees would be entertaining few nerds - all those 10 people preparing one day and putting a show on the second. I would call it a festival, not a small visit. My original idea was like couple of hours at the place and I would imagine that 1 guy would be enough to represent a powerpoint already existing and show a bit around the house. But don't worry, this happening will most likely never take place, so Jolla can sigh in relief that they don't need to invest 16000 eur to this :-) Hopefully these savings help to put out the next release 2.2.0 Mouhijoki soon! :-)