[wutbrodo]

I don't know that Facebook ever took over from Google in terms of reputation. There was a brief period during which they were being extremely competitive with salary, but Facebook has never inspired the excitement (and trust) that systematically attracted large swathes of top talent. The reputation of Google was idealistic and awesome for a long time and then it shifted towards the more traditional MS-corporate-evil thing. Facebook pretty much started out with a reputation for being ruthless and "evil", which has a real effect on how excited talent gets about working for your company.

[TillE]

Facebook was super cool as a service for a couple brief years when they were serving only college students. But yeah, I don't think they've ever been well liked as a company. In many ways they're the modern AOL.

[wutbrodo]

Yea I was in one of the (relatively) earlier groups of users since I was in college when they were college-only. I loved it when it was photo-sharing and event planning, but never got into (and still have never used) any of the other features they started adding. It's only recently that enough of my friends use FB messenger that I've started checking it once every day or two.