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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Is it just me or are Twitter, Reddit, and now Google, scrambling to lock their doors to any entities trying to scrape the web for new AI datasets?
All these hugely unpopular decisions, taken on short notice, that may be fatal to their platforms, seem to be more like knee jerk reactions to protect their treasure hoards of possible AI input data.
Opinions?
From a consumer perspective, it seems like all the FANG conglomerates are trying to shut the stable door after the AI horse has bolted, but perhaps from an industry perspective, their just trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves to curb competition, or stall any emerging upstarts, just like most FANGs where themselves only decades ago.
FANG isn’t really an accurate word anymore.
It’s MAAA: Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
You're missing Microsoft, it's bigger than Meta.
oh, MAMAA
Bonus: it sounds like a scream of terror.
They can try and reinvent themselves all they'd like, but I can't be bothered to keep up with their rebrandings if they can't be bothered to commit and sell off the domain name. Something something sacrifice, something, law of Equivalent exchange. /s
Didn't the N stand for Netflix?
Yes, but Netflix isn’t in the same class anymore (High growth, dominating their relevant fields, diversification). Nvidia may fit.
Netflix was (and imo, should still be) there because of their tech. Netflix was years ahead of other companies in terms of their backend engineering when the term was coined, and in many ways they still are.
They don’t employ the people who made their backend so special anymore. Not one of their original chaos engineering team work there anymore, and Brendan Gregg (Hooray for learning BCC/perf!) is over at Intel
Lmao Netflix is nowhere in the near these behemoths
well FAANG used to be mostly a shorthand for the big companies you might want to work at as a software developer/engineer.
not necessary because of the size of the company, since Microsoft is obviously missing from it.
It was actually about the stocks. Microsoft wasn’t a part of it because they weren’t “new”. I’m pretty sure Microsoft is actually in the new tech-stock-group.
After it was popularized as a group of tech stocks to buy, people just used it to talk about the biggest software companies, and a lot of devs I talked to (myself included) kinda implied Microsoft when we said FAANG. And while those companies did tend to pay higher than other devs, I think it’s pretty understood that comes with expectations and stress. None of my dev friends would ever wanna work in that environment.
you are right it does come from Stocks, I only ever heard it used as the place lots of new people aim to work at over at /r/cscareerquestion
No problem! That means you get to be one of todays lucky 10,000. They were definitely sought out positions. It did eventually enter common discussion as just a group of tech giants that pay higher than others. That’s why Microsoft was always implied for me.
There were tons of people who’d get a couple years in at one of the major companies and then just use that experience to work wherever they wanted and enjoy themselves. I couldn’t see myself working for one of those companies though. I think it’d be cool to work on some of the stuff they work on, but it seems like the work culture has gone down hill from when Google used to be considered an awesome place to be a dev.
You do know that FAANG is an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, not a type of company. Saying "...like most FANGs [sic] where themselves only decades ago" makes no sense as far as I can read it.
My phone keyboard spelling aside, when the acronym was first coined, correct, but it seems to have sence devolved into more of a colloquialism for large scale tech related corporations, outliving the precise corporate restructuring that once comprised the old acronym. At least that's what I've experienced in my workplaces, as well as the comments here:
Was there a equivalent house hold colloquialism for IBM, HP, Xerox, Bell System, etc. back in the day?
I just prefer that people actually are precise in their language to make things as clear as possible. Saying "FAANG-like companies" is precise and correct, saying "FAANGs" is nonsensical. I would always use FAANG as that acronym, if you just want to mean "Big Tech companies" then just say that instead. It's a lot more clear to a lot more people who don't share your tribal-speak of your workplace. People federated here are from a lot more places and making it easier for everyone to know what you're actually meaning should be a good thing.
Language is inherently messy, localized, and ephemeral, so it could be unwise to expect that kind of conformity on the global internet. It can be jarring, for example tech folk here in the EU seem to use corporate slang a lot differently than when I was working near SFO or DFW, we're I'd suspect the greater non-homogeneity of native speakers, as compared to the US, had a lot to do with it.
That aside, I think we merely disagree on the colloquial use of FAANG in 2023, as (from my anecdotal perspective) it seems to have semantically shifted into a categorical noun in common vernacular, rather than a once precise acronym from a decade ago, given most of the conglomerates behind the initial spelling have either re-branded, fallen in stock valuation, declined in labor desirability, or whatever else that had originally garnered acclaim and publicity. In that respect, pluralization of such a noun seems mundane, if not a little odd looking for typographical formatting.
Perhaps this could be coined as another stage of acronymization, or "acronym drift"; the process by which an acronym's original expansion and meaning become less relevant or obscured over time, and the acronym itself is treated and used as a regular word, independent of its original expansion. This can happen when the original meaning of the acronym is no longer relevant, but the acronym continues to be used and recognized based on its familiarity. An example that comes to mind is Google's original acronym for the QUIC protocol, which is no longer used to mean "Quick UDP Internet Connections", as was initially proposed.
It seems to me that you missed my point.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out why you may see others, or news outlets, refer to tech giants, such as Microsoft, as FANGs or FAANGs given the historical context, regardless of how one may prefer to grammatically re-phrase such nonsensical statements. E.g: