Google -> Adsense are their main profit and from where the real top dogs go, the rest work in projects that most of the time go to the crapper. A lot of their big name projects are based on C++. Facebook -> No idea, but they were using PHP and C++ right? (sorry, I don't follow much of FB engineering)

While I don't want to piss on Rails or Django or whatever, I've hardly seen a lot of companies that do use them to be working on really cool projects (and not another CRUD app for social horse riders to exchange organic cucumbers (hyperbole)). A lot of the 'cool' stuff that is happening in our world seems to be coming from more fringe languages (R, Julia, Haskell, Scala, F#) or old mainstream (C, C++, C#, Java) than the Ruby/NodeJS camp. If we go mobile, then we are even talking have to acknowledge both mainstream languages to develop are Java and a superset dialect of C - Objective C.

So honestly, if you take the beer and ping pong tables out of the equation, what are the advantages of these self-entitled cool companies over the others? (Btw, most big companies have pool tables, table tennis, gyms, beer, wine, XBoxes etc as much or more than the startups, they just don't post pictures of them on their blogs).