What I wonder is, how much of this is simply inevitable? As a company grows larger it is bound to have more bureaucracy and become more sluggish. The best and brightest, especially those looking to work somewhere that is more agile will inevitably leave which causes a slow and painful brain drain in the company.<p>I have to think this has happened at most other tech companies in the past. I am sure at one time, Microsoft was looked at as a great place to work. Apple may have experienced a similar brain drain, especially in the 90s when Steve Jobs was out.<p>Then I have to wonder how you can counteract it. The only thing I can really think of is maybe if you ran the company like a decentralized flat organization where teams/products are virtually autonomous. I can only think of maybe one case where this has worked out, but its outside of tech.
The story about Google engineers taking offers from Facebook is seriously overblown. Google is a huge company (>10k employees) and there's always going to be some amount of churn. People don't work at a single company for their whole life anymore. Sure, Lars Rasmussen leaving was newsworthy, but was it really surprising to anybody after the death of Google Wave?<p>Overall Google still hires orders of magnitude more people than it loses.
They're missing the <i>real</i> story of what's going on right now. Because of a variety of circumstances, like...<p>* recession<p>* weak job market<p>* convergence of mobile/web/social technologies<p>* cloud computing reducing startup costs<p>... we are experiencing one of the biggest technological entrepreneurial boom times in history. That's why Google can't hold onto their brightest developers... but it's probably also happening to every big company in the computing industry.
From the outside, as a mere user of Google's services, it seems like unless you're working on something like Chrome OS, the most/best you can do as a developer is make sure nothing breaks. What are the biggest stories you read about Gmail?<p>At Facebook on the other hand, virtually any internal project could change, well, everything. There's an excitement to that which Google can't/won't offer. Facebook's business is change; all they think about all day is how to change things. Google has a vested interest in things staying the same (again, with the exception of Chrome OS).<p>Maybe the coding challenges Google faces just don't have the sex appeal Facebook's have. Maybe the "slowing down" they say Google is going through isn't about size or the limitations that come with. Maybe Google's just not as cutting-edge, not as thrilling as it once was. Maybe working for Zuckerberg and his 500 million closest friends, changing the way we communicate, and with a <i>chance</i> at being part of something revolutionary, is now most thrilling thing out there. Maybe by a lot.
"And like many big companies, Google has been acquiring new technologies, like Android, instead of inventing them."<p>Google acquired Android? Did I miss something or should that be reversed?