Brain Drain from Hi-tech Companies

• Google has denied there is a brain drain of talent at the firm following the departure of Elliot Schrage, its head of global communications and public affairs, to social network Facebook.
• Google receives 500,000 resumes a year
• Others who recently jumped ship from Google:
• Google's VP of global sales, Sheryl Sandberg, who is now Facebook's chief operating officer
• Ben Ling, now facebook director of platform product marketing
• Google's Director of Social Media, Ethan Beard, director of business development
• [YouTube]Create? CFO Gideon Yu left after the google acquisition to become Facebook CFO
• Google head of special initiatives, Chris Sacca - "In a start up it's easy and it's encouraged for folks to wear multiple hats. As a company gets bigger, inevitably, it begins to organise itself vertically and employees are pushed to specialise."
• Other senior engineers and managers jumping off to Zillow, [FriendFeed]Create?, Twitter, and Xobni
• Justin Rosenstein - Facebook is "the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago"
• Google's 2008 employee count: 16,800 worldwide

• http://www.techcrunch.com tracks 50 exiting Yahoo execs since Jan 2007
• List includes VP of Engineering, VP of Global Research.
• Yahoo alumni page - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3290101701
• Comments
• New search engines may emerge that are as good as Google. Microsoft and Yahoo are not currently.
• Yahoo and Google beat out Altavista by having better algorithms than just looking at metatags.
• Competitor would have to come up with a substitution for adsense, to participare in the huge revenue around search.