Glassdoor: Google and Facebook drop out of top 10 of US “best places to work” list, Google to 11, Facebook to 23; Microsoft only tech giant to jump in rankings
- Facebook fell 16 places, Google drops out of the Top 10 — Microsoft one of the only tech giants to jump in the rankings
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's slide is now a multi-year arc, not a blip: it topped Glassdoor's list in 2018 after five wins in a decade, then fell to No. 7 in the 2019 rankings — and this year's 16-place drop to No. 23 extends the decline. Google's exit from the top 10 continues its own slow fade since Airbnb dethroned it for the 2016 list.
The counterpoint is Microsoft, the only tech giant moving up, a divergence that foreshadows the pattern later confirmed when the Drucker Institute put Microsoft first for a third straight year while Meta, Amazon, and Google dropped in its 2022 Management Top 250.
First-order effects
- Facebook's employer brand takes a second consecutive hit, falling from No. 7 to No. 23 just a year after losing the No. 1 spot it held in the 2018 list.
- Microsoft gains recruiting ground as the lone climbing tech giant, while Google drops out of the top 10 for the first time in this ranking cycle.
Second-order effects
- Candidate perception follows these rankings, so Facebook and Google now compete for engineering talent against Microsoft on a metric employees themselves score, not marketing budgets.
- Facebook's internal-pressure story compounds: the ranking slide precedes the worker-sentiment decline that later pushed Zuckerberg off Glassdoor's Top 100 CEOs list in 2021.
Third-order effects
- If the divergence holds, employee-rated rankings become a leading indicator of management quality across big tech — a gap the Drucker Institute's 2022 ranking later made explicit, with Microsoft on top and its rivals sliding.
The trend: Employee-scored workplace rankings are tracking a widening split among tech giants, with Microsoft climbing as Facebook and Google slide year over year.