Increasing employee pay is a bandaid on the real problem. Googlers think there are more interesting places to work. Not even a pay-raise, or a free massage can change that.
People leaving for potential higher pay (IPO) says more about those people than Google not being an interesting place to work at. Nothing that facebook has recently done that suggest to me that facebook might be more interesting place to work at.
Facebook and twitter might have the "momentum", but they are on a niche (social) thats unstable at best. Google on the other hand is not only on several stable niche, but they are trying new things all the time.
People who are leaving for facebook/twitter are riding the horse while its still fat. Nothing more, nothing less.
Facebook has a phenomenal amount of organized data about their customers, and a reasonable amount of unorganized data.
It's a data miner's heaven.
People leaving for potential higher pay, when it's a lot higher, is natural.
Also, working for a non-public company is often quite different than a public one. Facebook is private, so we really have no idea what it's like to work there, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with their money.
Also - engineers who can cop 3.5 million dollar raises just to stay somewhere aren't really concerned about job stability, yeah? They can find work easily.
Agree, they are chasing/riding the "momentum" wave. But as you said, Google has stability. That includes structure, process, bureaucracy. A big piece to these departures is - "Employees are tired of that bureaucracy."
Facebook is getting pretty big not to though, they are either going to run into the same bureaucracy or start seeing more issues with bugs being introduced. I have to say I much more frequently see bugs/ half deployed features popping up on Facebook than any of Google's core offerings.
I predict that as soon as facebook/twitter popularity will start to go down these same people will be some of the first to jump ship. I don't think this has much to do with bureaucracy.
Just because the core business is stable, doesn't mean there aren't projects on the fringes that aren't interesting and unstable. Even Microsoft comes up with cool things from their R&D labs. Just because the company is stable doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on.
As a programmer from the outside Google seems like a far better proposition overall given the diversity of what you could end up working on. Not every programmer at Google though can work on the most interesting stuff though so for them it could be about the work interest.
Don't forget the "grass is always greener" in people's minds rather than reality. And supply and demand tells us something too, these people are some of the best in the world and the economy needs/wants them elsewhere and is sending a price signal. The company is showing them that it values them, needs them, and responding with a price signal of their own. What's unusual? Google has tons of cash, their main infrastructure is their people. I don't see why people start wringing their hands and buying into the tech journalism hyperbole over all this. What other actions could Google take that wouldn't have people filling out blog posts with breathless speculation? I suspect none.
Also, Facebook's "vision of the web" is pretty crummy if you ask me, so I am surprised they have so much buzz. The only worse thing I can imagine than Facebook becoming the dominant player on the web would be Apple somehow acquiring or merging with them in an unholy alliance of evil.
If Apple merged with Facebook, we would at least have a (more) stable platform and a well-design interface. I can't imagine the Steve Jobs would be happy with the UI the way it currently is (especially all of the spelunking that needs to happen to find privacy settings).
Don't know about this particular case - but increasing employee pay by a significant amount is one very direct way of the company showing it's dedication and value to you - more direct than free espresso and other trinkets. Money talks.
