The giants of the tech industry have a lock on employer branding (think: quirky hiring practices , free food, and other perks that make work “fun”), but analysis of the personalities of their staffs presents a different picture of what it’s really like in the trenches.

A study published today by Good&Co analyzed the psychometric data gained from anonymous personality quizzes completed by 4,364 tech employees of what they believe are perceived as the five most innovative companies in Silicon Valley: Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM. In total, the two-year-long study also analyzed 10 million responses from 250,000 users. Questions ranged from thoughts and feelings about networking to how they handle problems at work.

The study concluded that Facebook lags behind the others for cultivating a culture of creativity. Microsoft employees are more innovative than those at Apple. Both Apple and Twitter’s corporate cultures are the most accurately representative of how employees perceived them. (No major conclusions were drawn about IBM’s employees in the study, aside from being a point of comparison.)

By now we know that company leadership and employees aren’t always aligned in their thinking about the workplace. Fast Company has previously covered the gap between the way each group thinks about a company’s culture. Research from the Workforce Institute at Kronos and WorkplaceTrends indicated that part of the disconnect came from a disagreement between HR, management, and staff regarding who was in charge of creating and driving company culture.

Good&Co sample questions

The Good&Co report reveals that the discrepancy dividing these tech companies’ true corporate culture from the one perceived by the rest of the world is often a result of timing. Facebook, for example, may be considered among the most innovative companies in the world, as it was the among the first social media platforms on the Internet, but the Good&Co study suggests that its early successes have resulted in a more conservative effort to sustain them.

Some of the most successful companies have internal cultures synonymous with their external expression.

“They’ve always had that reputation [of being innovative], and I think that now becomes a subconscious thing, that Facebook is innovative, but the current place they’re in as a business doesn’t require them to personally be innovative,” Samar Birwadker, the founder and CEO of Good&CO, tells Fast Company. “They invented social networks, and there’s always been this layer of innovation,” he explains, “but with more pressure on revenue, and especially on mobile and ads, I think we’re seeing a lot less risk taking and adventurousness by their employees.“

Birwadker adds that a series of failed product launches, including Parse and Paper, have led the social media behemoth toward a culture of playing it safe. “In a way they’re borrowing that innovation equity, or that halo effect they can get from [acquisitions] like Instagram and WhatsApp,” he observes.