How to elevate engineering culture at large corporations?

How different is the engineering culture at Twitter than that at Facebook? Which company should I join if I want to have stronger engineering skills and achievements?

• I'm having Software Engineering offers from both Facebook and Twitter. I've read a lot about both companies and how great the culture is in both of them. From what I've read, I think Twitter might be better than Facebook in most of the factors except for monetization and growth issues, which I don't care about as an Engineer. The thing that I do care about is the engineering culture. Facebook seems to be very engineering-directed and having really strong coding and ship-it culture, while I can't find enough info about engineering culture at Twitter. More specific questions: Engineering is first at Facebook, is it the same at Twitter? How often and fast is pushing code at Twitter than at Facebook? Is Twitter is moving fast? Also Twitter is much less in the number of employees, so are my chances to learn a lot, be more productive, code and build more stuff, and have start-up feeling are larger at Twitter than Facebook? Most of the videos or other Quora answers about Facebook engineering culture were pretty old when the company was much smaller. But now Facebook is getting bigger and bigger, is the engineering culture now is still like before? What about career development in both of them? In general, If you were me, what company will you join given that my priority is the technical & engineering skills that I'll acquire? tl;dr version: The main thing I care about is the engineering culture and in which company will I have better productivity and stronger technical skills. I'd really appreciate the answers of people who worked at one or both of the companies. This will definitely matter.

• Answer:

  They are direct competitors. Facebook is slightly more mature, giving Twitter a kind of underdog psyche. The money compensation packages will be similar, within about 25% of each other. To me, that is negligible. What you SHOULD be focusing is everything besides money, namely: Which people did you connect with better, and who could you imagine working with for the next 18 - 36 months? Which job is more interesting? And what differs between the jobs? Which job gives you more freedom? Can you fly between cities if you want? Does the physical location of your team's home office matter? Things like this are the most important.