[scorpion032]

The company that has a good engineering culture to flex your skills, and keep you from slacking off, keeps you happier.

At the risk of sounding presumptuous, it appears to me, Facebook has this "do it" thing much more than Google and well much beyond Yahoo.

[Silhouette]

It's also becoming ever clearer that Google isn't actually very good at doing things other than their core services: web search, e-mail, and the associated advertising platforms. Even those are slipping.

Now, that is very telling. Google should be awesome at building new products with the developer talent and general resources they have to throw at any idea with potential. And yet, they have basically released (and subsequently canned) one failure after another for a long time.

Even the advertising systems and related tools (Google Analytics and the like) are pretty poor in terms of usability/APIs; people use these tools because of Google's place in the market and because they give a lot of goodies away for free, not because the tools themselves are particularly good.

And even web search, the heart of Google's operation, isn't what it used to be: they seem to have become victims of their own success, with so many people out to game the system that a lot of their results pages aren't worth the time to type in a search term any more.

It's not clear how much of this is down to culture or management factors, and how much is just the unavoidable consequence of being the biggest kid on the playground. But either way, a lot of people at Google must have worked on projects like, say, Wave, and it's tough as a developer to put your heart into a job only to see it canned because it wasn't promoted effectively or the timing just wasn't right for the market.

Meanwhile, for all the extra features and so on, Facebook basically only has one product, and it's one of the most successful on the planet.

Other things being equal, which culture is going to be more fun to work in? It's not a tough decision, is it?