[nspiegelberg]

Facebook is rated higher for a number of reasons:

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.

[catch23]

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.

[zby]

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.

[hanula]

That's right. Facebook doesn't fn care about maintaining API and when something isn't working you find out it's deprecated, without warning.