Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Google does a thorough job placing monetary incentives on heroic effort. Not sure if those avenues are ever targeted by these people though.
To answer the original question: Depends on what you define as cool. Generally Google seems to value solving hard problems while fb values shipping innovative products.
Google: 1) has more perks (better food, car rentals, massages, etc) 2) has more money 3) is less focused on immediate return. IE, it's acceptable at google to work for years on an algorithm that hasn't shipped.
Facebook: 1) longer hours 2) smaller teams 3) greater impact / eng. There's about 1MM users per engineer. Everything at Facebook is measured in user impact. There's little patience for a product that doesn't ship.
This is completely non-scientific, but I work close to (or you could even say, in an enclave of) the Google campus and the immediate thing I notice is the relative scarcity of "fancy" cars compared to companies that pay similarly or even less. Lots of Priuses, Honda Civics (many of them older), much less BMW and Mercedes; the only expensive cars tend to be innovative sport coupes like Nissan Z or Lotus Elise.
If these statistics are actually representative (and not my selection bias), then this is worthy of respect and says a lot about the company DNA.
I can't argue on any objective basis on the financial motivation point. (How would I measure that? How did -you- measure that?) I will say that in my experience my coworkers are primarily motivated by the ability to have a outsized impact and the ability to work with great independence.
Facebook has a crazy-passionate hacker culture. Tons of engineers have really neat side projects, and plenty of these ship. Every six weeks or so we have (voluntary) all night hackathons, where there is plenty of food and drink, and the agreed task is simply to build something cool not related to our usual work.
Finally, P(Could work at Google | Works at Facebook) is really high. As evidenced by a recent news article, hundreds of Facebook people are actually Google alumni. I know many of my coworkers turned down Google offers to come here, and it's practically routine for new grad hires to have a Google offer as leverage in coming to FB.
One way to quantify the difference between the two types of engineers (if there is such a difference, as I hypothesize), would be to measure the volume of their open-source work prior to joining the companies. Maybe just number of contributed-to projects X years before joining as a rough estimate? Actually, I'd be interested in seeing that data for employees across the board at the major SV tech companies.
As google tries to improve the semantic search capabilities of google bot, I wouldn't be surprised if they are investing heavily in AI research, they have the money to look at a lot of future tech.
Also how Google has scaled to the point of treating datacenter as server has been pretty revolutionary.
What we know:
a. Lars and his brother Jens have been a team or working colleagues for at least a while (maybe since 1999)[2]. They co-founded Where 2 Technologies in 2003 which got acquired by Google in 2004 and became the core for Google Maps.
b. A big proportion of the Google Wave complaints surrounded the UX, both for end-users and devs.
c. Lars on Wave "On the team after a year and a half, when we started using it, it still took us a while on how to use it... how to be more productive using it." [3] The whole video is a good watch for those interested, and so you get the context of the quote as well. We can gather that Google Wave germinated from a very organic process including the UX.
d. Google's Wave in a Box project will include a subset of the functionality (simplification) of Google Wave. "This (Wave in a Box) project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware"[1]
What I think but really do not know and I suck at writing:
* With Lars leaving, it adds liquidity to the possibility of further change on Google Wave development or integration. It makes it pretty certain that the leadership on the project, Wave in a Box, or subsequent integration projects will at least be tweaked. This will be further confirmed if Jens leaves as well (a), but we have no idea at this point if he will.
* Losing Lars maybe Jens maybe others and they will lose a big whack of their engineering leadership on Wave, so you can expect further developments on the core technology to slow tremendously. What's left is the community building, repackaging, marketing, open-source, maybe some hope in monetization, some more experimentation, package and publish extensible protocols[4], maybe trying an adoption experiment (Wave in a Box, maybe enterprises will use it!!!, let's fight Outlook), maybe some hope in leveraging the existing technologies with integration, etc. Google Wave's team is probably focused just on that, and the head caveat on those tasks is the UX. They'll probably bring in or already have some outstanding UX folks. Maybe the leadership on that front wasn't there from the start, but we don't know as it was created in a very organic fashion (c).
* Google is a master at integration in most cases. Just look back at all the acquisitions that went really well, and on top of that, Wave is using most of the Google ecosystem already. While the Wave in a Box project continues, you can probably expect some Google Wave functionality and technology to pop up here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it makes an incremental and subtle appearance in some of GMail's functionality in the way Buzz has, but we don't know.
* Most of us would agree that Google Wave won't be coming back in its current form because the tarnished reputation. Such an event is more unlikely than finding a black swan, more like finding a transparent swan who can do calculus, but even finding one of those can happen. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wave in a Box, Google Wave Federation Protocol, and Google's ecosystem, hopefully good things.
[1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
[2] http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890
1. http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/ http://www.waveprotocol.org/
2. Wave Protocol summit is in November http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/10/wave-protocol-summ...
3. Wave in a Box (server + client) (vs Outlook in enterprises?) A very interesting adoption experiment, and if they separate it enough from the cloud, it will be a straight-forward germination in Outlook's market down the road. http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
4. If they're doing this much in public, you can bet there are a few integration projects at home as well.
http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/ http://googlewave.blogspot.com/ for Wave updates, definitely isn't dead I would say.
I disagree. In fact I think worrying about that is a bit like polishing the brass on the Titanic.
The biggest problem Wave had (and has) is "what problem does it solve?" What I heard time and time again could be summarized as "This is neat but what do we use it for?"
The problem with Wave is it's what can happen when engineers are in charge of product development. I look at Wave and see something that could be used as a building block for many other communication platforms (email, IM and so on) so they're solving a technical "problem" without solving any user problems.
It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next?
How do you mean that ?
Maybe he'll integrate Google Wave into Facebook? Well one can dream...
I think that these supposedly high profile departures might not be such a bad thing for Google, they might find a new Lars in their ranks that won't cost as much to retain (until she/he hits gold).