Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate
Facebook and Google have been competing with each over more than just social networking. Facebook is growing from 300ish employees today to 700 next year. And the best place to get good engineers and others is Google …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's rivalry with Google has stopped being just a product fight over social networking: the company intends to roughly double its headcount from around 300 employees to 700 next year, and it is filling those seats disproportionately with Google's own engineers and staff. With no comparable internal pipeline at that scale, Google's ranks are effectively Facebook's recruiting pool.
First-order effects
- Google is losing experienced engineers directly to a much younger competitor whose expansion plan depends on exactly the talent Google has spent years accumulating.
- Facebook gets seasoned, already-trained staff who can be productive immediately — critical to hitting its 300-to-700 ramp within a year.
Second-order effects
- Google will have to spend more to defend its workforce — richer packages, counteroffers, and faster promotion paths — raising the price of engineering talent across Silicon Valley as other startups bid for the same people.
- Recruiting competition tightens for computer science graduates too, since both companies are drawing from the same limited pipeline to feed their growth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, engineer retention becomes a core competitive weapon rather than an HR function, with compensation and equity designed explicitly to block rival poaching.
- A sustained drain could erode Google's execution capacity in adjacent product areas even where Facebook does not directly compete, making talent flow a strategic variable in the search-versus-social contest.
The trend: Silicon Valley competition is shifting from products alone to the engineers who build them, as fast-scaling consumer web companies treat incumbent workforces as their primary hiring market.