Study reveals tech firms’ reputations don’t match reality

(FILES) This file photo taken on June 19, 2013 shows an Instagram employee takes a video using Instagram's new video function at Facebook's corporate headquarters during a media event in Menlo Park, California. The user base of photo-sharing service Instagram has surged to half a billion, adding its latest 100 million in less than a year, the Facebook-owned application said June 21, 2016. "Today, we're excited to announce our community has grown to more than 500 million Instagrammers -- more than 300 million of whom use Instagram every single day," a blog post said. / AFP PHOTO / Josh EdelsonJOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images less (FILES) This file photo taken on June 19, 2013 shows an Instagram employee takes a video using Instagram's new video function at Facebook's corporate headquarters during a media event in Menlo Park, California. ... more Photo: JOSH EDELSON, AFP/Getty Images Photo: JOSH EDELSON, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Study reveals tech firms’ reputations don’t match reality 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

The reputations of tech companies often transform into legend and take on a life of their own.

Facebook, born out of fast-and-loose hacking sessions in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room, is routinely heralded for its speedy innovation. Apple, with its splashy TV ad campaigns, gets credit for think-different creativity. Microsoft, meanwhile, has been labeled as a bumbling dinosaur.

But a new study based on thousands of psychological profiles collected from tech workers employed at these companies tells different stories.

Facebook, for instance, which ranked No. 2 on Fast Company’s list of 2016’s most innovative companies, was found to be among the least creative compared with its peers. And Microsoft outpaced both Facebook and Google in adventurousness.

“Looking for a workplace that prioritizes a creative culture? Avoid Facebook,” the study’s authors concluded.

MBA BY THE BAY: See how an MBA could change your life with SFGATE's interactive directory of Bay Area programs.

Good&Co, which collected data for the study over the past two years, offers online quizzes that allow users to uncover their professional personality profile and determine which companies may be a good fit, chief executive Samar Birwadker said.

Users are encouraged to provide work history information and invite co-workers and superiors to take the quizzes. Good&Co then uses this information to provide insight about how a user may better communicate or interact with his or her coworkers. That data is then used to build a personality profile of a company.

Birwadker said Good&Co has statistically significant data on more than 1,200 companies, including dozens of tech firms.

The company, which released its findings Wednesday, evaluated more than 4,000 tech workers in its first broad analysis of data from different institutions.

Some of the results were more surprising than others, Birwadker said.

“Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, people don’t really see the nuance of these tech companies,” he said. “Facebook is always seen as incredibly innovative, but we noticed the level of innovation there is much lower than other tech companies we looked at.”

Managers at the social media titan might be good motivators, according to the data, but they fall far behind their own employees and managers at other tech firms — including Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft — in adventurousness and intellectual curiosity.

This disinterest in risk-taking, Birwadker said, may have influenced some of Facebook’s recent business moves.

In December, Facebook shut down its experimental Creative Labs division, which had created a series of experimental social apps aimed at testing new interfaces and studying how people interact socially using technology.

And just this month, Facebook and Instagram, the photo- and video-sharing app it owns, unveiled new features that executives admitted they ripped off from Snapchat, an instant lifecasting app popular with young users who have been fleeing Facebook in recent years.

“The tech industry talks a big talk. They’re disrupters and renegades that glorify breaking the rules,” Good&Co researchers Kerri Schofield and Roni Mermelshtine wrote in their analysis. “But our data suggests that Facebook culture was never quite as focused on innovation as was originally thought and perceived — toeing the line and staying in the box might be the key to success after all.”

Even Facebook’s iconic motto of “move fast and break things” was scrapped in 2014 after CEO Zuckerberg announced the company was instead embracing a new mantra: “Move fast with stable infra(structure).”

Author and former startup founder Antonio Garcia Martinez, who worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2013 as a product manager, recently published a book in which he compared the culture at the tech juggernaut to fascism.

“If you think you’re going to go in there and kick the beehive and change some part of the technical space, it’s actually very hard to do,” he said. “People who stay (at Facebook) like having the feeling that they’re cutting edge. And you do have impact because you’re affecting a product that almost 2 billion people use, but you can’t actually make anything happen. You’re a part of a big ship, but you can’t steer it to the left or right.”

Martinez, who had not seen the study, said he had long suspected Facebook was sacrificing creativity and innovation as it exploded in size. But the company wasn’t always that way.

“It actually used to be pretty ... chaotic,” he said. “But the days of Facebook being an entrepreneurial innovator of all kinds of cool stuff is really up. And I think they’re aware of their own mortality.”

He agreed that the shutdown of Creative Labs and Facebook’s new Snapchat-like features exemplified this failure of culture.

“They’re not even trying anymore,” he said.

According to the study, managers at Google demonstrated a similar issue with risk-taking.

And Apple, which openly mocked Microsoft at a tech conference for ripping off the Macintosh operating system, proved to be matched in adventurousness and industriousness by its longtime rival. Apple’s managers tend to score higher on traits like intellect and attention to detail.

Microsoft’s “cool factor” may be on the rise, however, Birwadker said.

In Good&Co’s analysis of recent hires, Microsoft appeared to favor more adventurous candidates than Apple, despite being widely considered the more conservative of the two. In 2014, long-serving CEO Steve Ballmer resigned in favor of Satya Nadella, a fast-rising executive who has pushed the company in new directions.

“It’s changing over time,” Birwadker said. “Since 2014, we’re seeing from the data a pretty large shift in Microsoft’s attitudes, especially on two specific traits: adventurousness and curiosity.”

Change, he added, often comes when a company sees shifts in leadership, size, hiring practices or what consumers want.

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @Marissa_Jae