Facebook's ranking drops from No. 1 to No. 7 in Glassdoor's 2019 list of best places to work in the US chosen by employees; Google is 8th and Microsoft is 34th
Career website Glassdoor today released its 11th annual Employees' Choice Awards, a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the coming year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's slide is the end of a long run at the top of Glassdoor's employee-voted list: after dethroning Airbnb as the best US tech employer in 2016 and topping the 2018 ranking, it now lands at No. 7 while Google holds No. 8 and Microsoft sits far back at No. 34.
The drop matters because Glassdoor's rankings are built entirely from employee reviews, making them a public read on internal sentiment at exactly the moment tech giants are competing hardest for talent — and the trajectory here points down, not up.
First-order effects
- Facebook loses the recruiting halo of a No. 1 ranking it held a year earlier, handing rivals a concrete talking point in offers against it.
- Google, at No. 8, becomes the highest-ranked of the three giants named, while Microsoft's No. 34 shows how wide the gap is even among perceived peer employers.
Second-order effects
- Competitors gain leverage in senior-talent negotiations by citing Facebook's declining employee ratings, pressuring it to respond on compensation or culture rather than brand.
- Glassdoor's annual list hardens into a reputational scoreboard that tech companies must actively manage, since year-over-year movement is now newsworthy in itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, employee-review platforms function as an early-warning system for Big Tech culture problems: Facebook's fall continues out of the top 10 the following year, and Zuckerberg eventually drops off Glassdoor's Top 100 CEOs list for the first time since 2013.
- Workplace rankings shift from marketing assets to structural indicators that investors and candidates read alongside product news, raising the cost of internal-sentiment decline for every large tech employer.
The trend: Employee-rated workplace prestige at Big Tech firms is eroding year over year, with Glassdoor's annual rankings serving as the public barometer of that decline.