Is Facebook rated higher because it is the new cool kid in the neighborhood or because it is doing something different? After all, Google was considered the best place to work less than 5 years ago.
Google went crazy with hiring in 2006 and relaxed its standards, letting in a bunch of duds. There's a higher chance at Google that your manager is going to be a creep and your coworkers are going to be mouth breathers. Facebook is younger and smaller so does not face these issues (yet). If you do encounter a poser at Facebook, at least they are a cool, young , good looking poser, not a yucky beardo comp sci Phd poser...
Also, every bullshit funded startup in NYC pays what Facebook is paying, or better. (just a pro tip in case anyone else here is too old for facebook but needs to make some dough after spending too much time in the 80-90k zone, like I did)
Let's just say I know enough Googlers who are currently fed up with the influx of subpar nooglers. It's not just one data point -- at least 4 of my googler friends complained about the new employees. They mention that Google stopped hiring around the economic crisis, and when the economy picked up again, they had to hire twice as fast to make up for the lost time and in doing so, they let in people who should have been rejected. I also recall that Eric Schmidt says his biggest mistake was to halt the hiring during the recent economic downturn.
I'm a Googler with the opposite complaint: in my neck of the woods we seem to be so picky that you start to wonder how any of us ever got hired. A person can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed good) get an offer.
Google's a big company, so I'm sure that some pockets err on one side, some on the other.
I agree with you. And the effectiveness of the criteria Google uses to screen & interview candidates is highly debatable, at best.
One of their recruiters once contacted me (because I went to a 'top university') but decided it would be a 'waste of time' because I hadn't done any Java or C++ recently. It used to be that Google was interviewing for knowledge of the fundamentals unlike most other 'business-oriented' companies that want specific recent skills.
Nowadays it seems that they've got the 'worst' of both worlds - I heard they interview for very hard-core graph programming algorithms, and at the same time they want recent experience with Java or C++. So basically if you've recently only done Lisp/Smalltalk/etc or even Python, you don't qualify. Where is the logic in that?
On top of that, my impression was that the salary levels of their employees were fairly astronomical, on par with the ones paid by banks/hedge funds, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.
The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the interview.
I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.
Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I certainly don't count it against them.
I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years, that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but it will be harder.
> A person can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed good) get an offer.
That's actually fairly common in the Silicon Valley. It's 10 to 20 people on the market, not 10 to 20 programmers selected at random: some are specialists in fields other than the ones you're looking for (or their resume is misread by the recruiter e.g., someone who has experience with enterprise search but is being interviewed for a web search position), others lack certain specific knowledge you do want, yet others are looking for a place where they can be "promoted to their level of incompetence".
A rate of 1/10 or 1/20 (5-10%) is actually very good and indicates an ability to recruit and screen well.
If 10 or 20 people are getting to the technical interview stage and failing to qualify, that points to a problem. That adds up to a lot of non-productive time for the interviewers.
I was asking to get an objective definition of a "subpar" noogler.
I'm about to be a recent college grad and I want to know what subpar is so I can spend my time now making sure that I am not that.
It's really frustrating to me when people say things like "Let's just say I know enough Googlers who are currently fed up with the influx of subpar nooglers." And I have no idea what they mean.
1) High impact. Most team sizes are 5 people or less. Those 5 people are handling big systems like photos or memcache. You know you're doing important things.
2) Move fast. Example: Facebook Groups went from concept to release in 3 months. In other companies, it would take 3 months just to get through release engineering.
3) Hackathon! People here love to code, and the environment encourages you. A lot of managers have switched back to SWEs, reinforcing that it's not demeaning to stay technical.
4) Still growing. It's true, new hotness normally trumps old & established. However, where Google started doubling every 6-9 months; Facebook tries to maintain top quality at the occasional expense of slower growth. This is helping the company retain most of its original culture.
Here's another data point: Googlers hate doing partner stuff. Google has lots of APIs they have to maintain -- everything from Android to GData and that puts a burden on SWEs who spend half the time writing new code, and the other half supporting partner companies who rely on google engineers to help fix their shitty code.
Yeah. I can imagine how nice it is when you are free to release code and docs with the quality of Facebook API offerings and nobody would tell you any bad word about that.
Why would being "the new cool kid" affect job satisfaction ratings by employees? Unless you're suggesting they are more satisfied due to the coolness of the idea of working there.
There're a whole bunch of benefits that you get from working at the "cool new kid":
1.) Everything you do automatically has an audience. People care about the software you write and use it in their daily lives.
2.) You get social cachet from working there. Say "I work for Google", and a bunch of people will say, "Oh, that must be nice. I wish I was smart enough to get in there." Outside of a few nerds who are too cool for FaceBook, saying "I work for FaceBook" gets the same reaction.
3.) Being in a younger, game-changing company gives you the chance to work on cooler, game-changing technologies. Many tech workers are attracted by hard problems; young, fast-growing companies tend to have lots of hard problems.
4.) When companies are younger, they've accumulated less legacy code and fewer bureaucratic procedures. If you ask a bunch of Googlers what they hate most about working for Google, I bet a large portion will say "legacy code". This is a maintenance tax that isn't fun at all, yet has to be dealt with whenever you build something on top of it. Being younger and smaller, FaceBook has less of this.
#2 is a fair point, but I think you have it reversed on #1 and #3. You are a cool company _because_ you're young, game changing and have an audience, not the other way around.
#4 is a property of most young companies regardless of their popularity.
Don't forget about the 'halo effect'. If a company is performing well, it tends to lead to better results in employee surveys, for no other reason than that.
I know this doesn't exactly explain why facebook does better in the surveys than google, but I think part of the reason facebookers feel more satisfied, is because they know they get paid more than googlers.
Maybe the difference of age as well ? If I had to do some basic data analysis, age + family would be the first two explanatory variables I would look at. But without data, that's as clueless as anyone's else guess of course.
Also, every bullshit funded startup in NYC pays what Facebook is paying, or better. (just a pro tip in case anyone else here is too old for facebook but needs to make some dough after spending too much time in the 80-90k zone, like I did)