No. A lot of my former classmates from Stanford work at Google and Facebook. Among the engineers, there is a pretty clear trend that the more hacker-like ones are at Google (or Microsoft Research) and the more financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry) are at Facebook. Maybe it's just that the latter couldn't get into the former company, I'm not sure. Among the non-engineers (human resources, etc), the employees that I know look a lot more similar.
I can't and won't say anything about Google, but I will say that your implication that we Facebook employees are greedy, un-hacker-like and unable to get into Google is inaccurate and unfair.
I can't argue on any objective basis on the financial motivation point. (How would I measure that? How did -you- measure that?) I will say that in my experience my coworkers are primarily motivated by the ability to have a outsized impact and the ability to work with great independence.
Facebook has a crazy-passionate hacker culture. Tons of engineers have really neat side projects, and plenty of these ship. Every six weeks or so we have (voluntary) all night hackathons, where there is plenty of food and drink, and the agreed task is simply to build something cool not related to our usual work.
Finally, P(Could work at Google | Works at Facebook) is really high. As evidenced by a recent news article, hundreds of Facebook people are actually Google alumni. I know many of my coworkers turned down Google offers to come here, and it's practically routine for new grad hires to have a Google offer as leverage in coming to FB.
Hi ambition, I was painting with pretty broad strokes, and I did not intend to say Facebook employees are "greedy" (I do not believe I did say that). I meant that the value systems of the people I know in both places tend to be slightly different.
One way to quantify the difference between the two types of engineers (if there is such a difference, as I hypothesize), would be to measure the volume of their open-source work prior to joining the companies. Maybe just number of contributed-to projects X years before joining as a rough estimate? Actually, I'd be interested in seeing that data for employees across the board at the major SV tech companies.
Interesting. My experience with the two organizations would lead me to disagree. Fb eng are not more focused on wealth than my friends at Google.
To answer the original question: Depends on what you define as cool. Generally Google seems to value solving hard problems while fb values shipping innovative products.
Google: 1) has more perks (better food, car rentals, massages, etc) 2) has more money 3) is less focused on immediate return. IE, it's acceptable at google to work for years on an algorithm that hasn't shipped.
Facebook: 1) longer hours 2) smaller teams 3) greater impact / eng. There's about 1MM users per engineer. Everything at Facebook is measured in user impact. There's little patience for a product that doesn't ship.
> financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry)
This is completely non-scientific, but I work close to (or you could even say, in an enclave of) the Google campus and the immediate thing I notice is the relative scarcity of "fancy" cars compared to companies that pay similarly or even less. Lots of Priuses, Honda Civics (many of them older), much less BMW and Mercedes; the only expensive cars tend to be innovative sport coupes like Nissan Z or Lotus Elise.
If these statistics are actually representative (and not my selection bias), then this is worthy of respect and says a lot about the company DNA.
I don't have many friends at Facebook, but my several friends at Google are all plenty concerned with nice cars, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry.
