Looking at 10ks filed with the SEC for both from the end of 2017, FB reports 25k employees vs Google's 80k.
There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar.
I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week, FB... its so rare I can't even give you a consistent interval, once every few months?
Facebook's NY office is also significantly, disproportionally smaller than Google's. Google's NY office is the largest outside of California and is in many ways a second heart of the company, it really doesn't feel like a remote office. Facebook's NY office is extremely small even considering that Facebook is a smaller company than Google (their largest office outside of California is, IIRC, Seattle).
In theory we have just as good a recruiting presence on the west coast, and we have an office out there to be based out of as well (I am all for completely remote, but have yet to get upper mgmt comfortable). In practice, I doubt this is true, and also working for a hedge fund probably has a lot less draw and prestige associated with it out west.
This may account for it but I still find the discrepancy to be unusual.
In addition to what Itaxpica said (which is very true), I believe I read somewhere that FB does have a lot of non-engineer employees. Can't provide a credible source or even a reason for why that is so.
There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar.
I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week, FB... its so rare I can't even give you a consistent interval, once every few months?