SEATTLE -- From the 35 software engineers writing lines of code, to the basket of plastic toy guns and various video game consoles, the office has all the trappings of a Seattle tech startup.
You won't even find a big banner with the company's logo hanging anywhere.
But the men and women sprawled throughout the eighth floor office overlooking Pike Place Market have the online weight of the world's largest social network on their shoulders.
"I think Seattle is a serious commitment for Facebook to grow out," said software engineer Philip Su, who notes that Facebook now boasts around 750 million users. "That's probably a little over a million Facebook users per engineer. So every engineer's job actually comes with a lot of responsibility and a lot of impact."
It's no coincidence Facebook put its only engineering hub outside Palo Alto in the bastion of Microsoft. Like Zynga and Google and Ebay, Facebook is hedging its bets by opening up shop in an area where you can find tens of thousands of experienced potential employees.
"I think if you looked at Seattle maybe 15 years ago, there was basically only Microsoft," said Su. "And I think over the past 15 years, especially in the last three years, you see a lot of tech companies moving into Seattle, both startups and established companies."
Like many of his co-workers, Su left Microsoft for Facebook in September. While he is quick to praise his former employer of 12 years, he noted there is a stark difference between how the two businesses run.
For example, unlike Microsoft, Facebook maintains a tradition where no employee gets his or her own office. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg sits at an open workspace, said a company spokesperson.
"And most teams at Facebook are done by two to four people doing major features," Su said.
In fact, Su was the only programmer working full-time on Facebook's Skype video chat integration announced a few weeks ago.
Su said he worked for five months with Skype colleagues to get the system to a point where it would take less than three clicks of a mouse to open up a video chat with another person.
"I think what you'll find in the Seattle office is a pretty good spread of what goes on in [Facebook's]California [headquarters] as well," he said. "So you'll find people that work on mobile projects, or people like me that work on video calling, on chat, platform and ads."
Now, with newcomers to the social media arena like Google+, which already has netted 20 million unique visits in three weeks, according to Comscore, innovation from the Seattle office may be more important than ever.
"Google+ does have a video component to it, which is in my area," Su said. "I've not really thought much about the rest of it. I do think that Facebook has been thinking for a long time that the Web is going to become more and more social and so obviously there are going to be a lot of players in that space. I have myself not thought about Google+'s video as a competitor to what I'm doing."
And he said there's plenty of room on the ever-growing social Web.
"We're going from the Internet where everybody browses sites anonymously to an Internet where people are first class objects... where sites understand who you are, who you love, what sorts of things you pursue, and the site is made better because of that understanding of you," Su said.
"And I think Facebook is really at the core of that transition of the Internet."
A good chunk of that transition might well be here, on and eight floor office overlooking Puget Sound.
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