[smysore]

The culture at Google is probably also driven by the fact that it's such an academic environment (in addition to the fact that there's a lot of pro-engineer sentiment). Facebook has an engineer-driven culture and it's apparently an awesome environment for programmers but according to Paul Buchheit (who has worked at both places) it feels a lot more like dorm room hacker culture and is totally different from Google.

He talks more about company culture here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebooks...

[sabj]

From friends who have worked at FB (in particular, both FB and Google) they report that the culture is a little strange and affected: Mark and others put a big emphasis on the importance of their 'hacker culture,' but try to create said culture through the exhortations to protect it... [?]

Anyway, I can't vouch for Facebook one way or another, but I can say that Google certainly has a very strong culture, although it waxes and wanes depending on where in the company you may be, and can take on different characteristics by business function. Also, you really can only get a certain snapshot by visiting, versus actually working there!