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Comment by WYepQ4dNnG | Hacker News Reader

I am glad I did not join them last year when I had the chance. Went for a FAANG instead. I see pure chaos for the foreseeable future.

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That's probably for the best for both parties. Twitter sounds really freaking exciting right now. If I were leaving uni, I would be rushing to get in there instead of a FAANG. If mad product development happens, you'll have a chance to be there, making it work. The only reason I'm not is that I've got even more fun going on.

But FAANG folks self-select as low-variance people in general, so it's best that they seek low-variance outcomes. Happiness is in indulging your true nature.

I suggest you to keep practicing those leetcode ...

Haha, top bants. I genuinely love it.

FWIW I wasn't insulting anyone. Evidence that I'm not a hater:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30980395

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30960680

Low-variance outcomes are just that: low-variance. If you're a decent FAANG engineer, you're making in the $500k at least by your 5th year, if not earlier, which puts your net worth at 50 at around $25 million. Pretty good outcome and quite certain.

That's pretty petty

Reminds me - why was Twitter never considered a FAANG? FATNAG, etc.

Not big enough.

Cramer used it to refer to high growth tech stocks that dominate their markets and have large market caps, Twitter was none of those.

If memory serves it has a much smaller number of employees.

FAANG was coined by Wall Street and refers to high growth stocks (which is why it didn't also include Microsoft).

msft has grown as much or more than google and apple. (and more than fb and netflix)

Not when the term was coined in 2013. It's honestly outdated.

MSFT stock mostly stagnant during Balmer, growth during Gates and Nadella. Balmer had bad luck expanding into new areas.

At the time MS was old hat. They only grew because Office 365 extended their natural monopoly in enterprise. Definitely a good stock pick in hindsight, but not the new type of ‘new’ platform growth that was going on at FAANG at the time.

because it never made money and had poor user growth metrics, FAANG companies are like 10x the size

Why not Tesla?

Tesla isn't a mass-market software/online-services business. They manufacture, which means a lot of capital going into factories and a lot higher of material-input costs, and they're kind of a high end brand.

This gives their business different performance characteristics from Facebook (mass market social-media and ads), Amazon (mass market sales and logistics), Apple (which is at least slightly luxury, but contracts out its manufacturing, and does mass market hardware — look at that iPhone sell), Netflix (mass market entertainment), and Google (mass market search, mail, advertising).

Amazon and apple probably both have more capital invested in factories, warehouses, etc than Tesla does. Apple is also kinda a high end brand. They seem a lot more similar than different.

You might be thinking of contract manufacturers like Foxconn.

it was a made up stock market acronym. twitter hasnt performed well.

bigger question is why was microsoft not part of it? mainly because it didnt form a catchy word.

The way things are trending, it's going to be FAAG soon, which is not so good. I guess, technically, it's not F anymore, so it's MAAG, which is almost as perilous. But if we're truly being technical, it's not G, it's a, in which case it's MAAA, in which case we might as well go with GOAT.

MAAG or MAGA? Oh, wait

I think FAANG should be renamed to MAAG the only companies that will continue to dominate the tech industry at least of the next 2 decades ...

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google

Everything else ... not so sure ...

I think Meta is probably here to stay, but you're right Microsoft should probably be in there. So, GAMMA.

For the same reason Microsoft wasn't.

There are only so many letters you can use to make a word and some companies had to be dropped.

The original meaning was a term to describe the big tech companies.

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