This is a question I often face when recruiting engineers to Facebook.

It’s not that I’m poaching Google employees left and right but for some reason, Facebook and Google are often competing for similar talent at literally the same time. Funny how that works out.

Both Borislav and Brian hit on some key differences between Google and Facebook’s engineering culture.

• We hire differently. From what I’ve seen, Google focuses heavily on algorithmic expertise. Facebook demands more of a consistent shipping mentality. Both companies pay very similar attention to how well you know or could learn system design. Why? It’s critical at scale and that’s why both companies have massive infrastructure, systems, SRE and Production Engineering teams.
• Borislav has a great answer mentioning scale. Facebook is about growth in users, across nearly all products. There’s a lot happening when it comes to who’s posting what, where they’re doing it or what photo to show you on Instagram for example. It’s all about relevance and doing this quickly, accurately and at the scale of billions of people across whatever product you might be using is an incredibly difficult problem.
• Both rely on advertising as a main revenue source but do it differently. Google makes money primarily on a pay per performance or in their world, PPC (pay per click). You only pay on a click. Facebook has this too but it also offers CPM which is geared towards # of impressions to certain subset of an audience. How you target on both is also incredibly different. Google is all about the keyword and potentially even site health, site speed, site tenure etc. Facebook can help you pinpoint user behavior, interests and related categories. For some businesses Google is a better advertising ROI while others depend on Facebook because it offers them a better ROI. Engineering behind the search and ads teams at both respective companies are actually quite different because they have different goals, user data sets and end points.
• Facebook moves faster. This could simply be because we’re a smaller company when it comes to headcount or a difference in philosophy of how to test and ship quality code.
• Google has more breadth when it comes to products and projects. Google has been around longer, invested in different things over the years and has more people to work on more things. You’ll likely have more potential projects/products to work on at Google.
• Impact is a variable that can be achieved both at Google or Facebook. Regardless of where you might work, you have a good chance to actually do something that matters and drive impact. This is especially true if you’re working on search, ads or other teams like video. These are core and upward trending teams.
• Both companies are investing heavily in new technologies like AR/VR but are also investing in some very different areas. Google has it’s venture arm while Facebook has both WhatsApp and Messenger. Even Internet.org.
• Facebook is more mission driven. Most people at Facebook actually believe in what we do. They stand by the mission, encourage it among others and feel empowered to push the boundary on achieving it.
• Both give back to the open source community. Facebook and Google are massive contributors to the open source community and will continue to do so for years to come.

If you’re considering Facebook or Google, you’ll likely end up somewhere you’re surrounded by incredibly smart people, incredible technology and unmatched scale. Both companies are positioned to be around for a long time.