I'm a software engineer working for Infospace. Infospace has two campuses, in Seattle and Bellevue, although I've only been working at the Seattle one so that's all I can comment on.

The current location is an old harbor pier, previously used as a warehouse. When we moved in it was refurbished and a third level built. The first level is occupied by a yacht-cruise agency, a parking lot for a relatively small number of cars (60?), and a pretty fancy seafood restaurant. Infospace occupies parts of the top two floors, with mostly product team folks (planners, upper management, people that talk to clients, ad team, sales team) on top, and other folks (engineers, human resources, legal, financial, misc administrative stuff) on the second floor of the pier.

There are about, hrm, 300-400 people in the pier. There's room for 600, and at one time there were more like 500 people there, but a bunch have been moved to Bellevue (the building lease was made pre- the acquisition of go2net (where I used to work) by Infospace (who was originally just in Bellevue), so go2net was planning on having their entire 500-600 person company at the pier).

The general layout is something like this: The pier is *long*. The floors are made up of two rows of blocks with a hallway in between, like this:

(# = one block)

         ^
 LAND    |
 LAND OTHER PIERS   WATER
 LAND ############  WATER
 LAND ------------  WATER
      ############
        WATER       WATER

(we're on the last pier, so there's open water for a while to one side until the land curves around, where there's a park)

On the second floor, one block looks like this:

----  -----  ----        The o's mark the four offices per wall.
| o|   c|c   |o |        These have a door so they can be closed but
|--|   -|-   |--|        a glass wall to see through. One person can fit
| o|   c|c   |o |        in an office comfortably or two a bit cramped.
|--|   -|-   |--|        The c's mark cubicles; there are actually more
| o|   c|c   |o |        like six or eight in a column, not four.
|--|   -|-   |--|        The openings at the top lead to the main hallway.
| o|   c|c   |o |        Running along the bottom wall is another smaller
----         ----        hallway that also goes most of the length of the
-----------------        pier.

On the top/third floor, a block is smaller, more like

--- ---       So four offices off a small hall. Not everything is like
|o| |o|       this, some are two- or three- or four-person offices.
--- ---       But there are a bunch like this.
|o| |o|
-------

Also, some blocks on both the top and second floors are meeting rooms, which typically hold about eight people sitting or twice that if a bunch crowd in around the edges. Some of the top floor ones are bigger and hold more like 12 comfortably and twice that with crowding, and there are two largish ones that hold maybe 60 and 80 at full (ie, crowded) capacity. The lunchroom, which is on the end of the pier (ie, the right-end point into the water on that picture above) sometimes doubles as a meeting hall, and can hold, I dunno, maybe 100, 150 crowded. It's been a problem there's no room in the building big enough to hold everyone, but possibly the argument is that happens infrequently enough that it's better just to do what we do now, which is to rent out a room in a hotel downtown and drive people there by bus.

Hmm. Obviously, equipment-wise, everyone has a computer. This means, of course, a huge number of wires snaking down the halls. They have a pretty nice thing, with, hrm, this elevated ledge thing holding the wires up near the ceiling out of the way so people don't trip, and the ledge runs all the way down the main hallway, splitting off to go into each block to the computers that are needed. Also equipment-wise, we have a couple rooms devoted to network stuff: they hold our shared development servers, all the phone-system and network wiring, and all the spare parts.

What's good about this: the view, which I didn't mention. Notice that none of the offices have views, and none of the cubicles do either except the very end ones. However, there are big windows on the ocean-side walls, and on the lunchrooom walls, so if you're eating lunch or if you've stood up to walk over to the window a bit, it's a beautiful view of the ocean and stuff. So, yeah, nice, but it'd be nicer if the offices had the views. There is this whole philosophy on offices versus cubes. These are "good offices" in the sense that they've got windows in the walls so when the door is closed you aren't completely enclosed; this is a little loss of privacy but it's really unpleasant to be in a room with no windows with the door closed, like (I am told) our bellevue office has. But, anyway, some people like cubes because it makes it easy to talk and easy to listen on what people are saying, and maybe you hear something you can contribute to (this happens pretty often, actually, maybe once every other day or so for me). The downside is the obvious loss of privacy; you hear other people's phone calls (a coworker is named Christian; another coworker is always making calls to a guy named Christian; annoyed wackiness ensues), sometimes it's hard to concentrate, when you want to have a private meeting with someone (eg, an interview) you can't do it at your cube, sometimes there's noise from the halls. Joel Spolsky has a whole bunch of stuff on this, soem of which I don't agree with, but it's well-thought-out nevertheless. http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$127 and http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$75 in particular.

What's bad: hrm, mostly covered by what's good. Oh, and location, location, location. The view is good, everything else sucks. Parking is hard, it's off major bus routes because it's just outside downtown, there are hardly any places to eat, so they need a company cafeteria, and we're a bit too small to really sustain one properly. The best place for an internet company to be, if it's relatively small (ie, <400 people, say), is in an office building in the heart of downtown near a couple parking lots (which is just where our last place was before we moved). You can rent out a couple floors and rework them. This has the disadvantage of splitting people up more (since the floors are much smaller than the pier floors, obviously) (and it's very inconvenient to take an elevator between floors, whereas at the pier you just walk up one flight of stairs), but the location can't be beat. Also, there's the whole cube/office issue.

Um. Also, at the pier, we have a bunch of vending machines with free drinks, which is good, a room for the arcade games someone had, another room or two for, like, the foosball table and so on. These are all good. There are some open lounge areas off the hallway with a table and some armchairs. These should get used more but don't, I don't know why. Maybe they aren't private enough.

Ok, that's all I can think of for now. If you need more info or whatever, ask.