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.
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.