About a week later, a tech recruiter called and asked me if there was any sort of company I wouldn't work at. I said, yeah, I wouldn't want to work in any social media company. He challenged me by pointing out that the money and prestige has to be tempting, right?
I told them Facebook contacted me the week before and I declined.
The hem and haw, followed by 'uhhh.... well" and silence was revealing.
To be fair, I have zero chance of getting into Facebook, especially for what they contacted me for.
You could have gone a bit further, and been a "person who refused a job offer from Google". That, imo, would carry more weight.
It's similar to the way some companies specifically look for newly admitted Stanford/Harvard/MIT students, then pay those students ridiculous sums to give up college and work for them instead.
I think it's more than the money. Many engineers view FB and Google as kind of a rite of passage in tech. Ex-Googlers and ex-FBers are highly regarded. Your startup is safe hiring them because they have been vetted already.
I turned down an opportunity to interview at FB in 2008 when they were just starting to build their native mobile team. I was even offered a free flight from Chicago and was told I'd get to meet Zuck. Some of us have refused to work for companies that exploit user data and have always put ethics first. But "person who refused to interview at Google" doesn't sound as nice as "ex-Googler" to most.