in which the Hollywood Reporter, of all outlets, attempts to explain our very good friends and their billionaire very good friends to normal people (www.hollywoodreporter.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

FAANG came about because of "unexpected growth" in how those could "surprisingly" capture money, as time has passed it's become clear how all of them did so in pretty shitty ways (of the bigtech-flavoured "it's better to never ask for permission, fuck 'em" variety)

netflix's burgeoning unpopularity is a far more recent thing. I could guess at a few inputs, but not really sure how much each contributed

(idle thought: without the N, it's probably be GAFA or something, or finding another letter to substitute and make a tortured reference out of that)

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

FAANG came about because of “unexpected growth” in how those could “surprisingly” capture money

I don't know the origin, but I came to know the term itself from my time as a freshman Computer Science student, where "working at FAANG" was to be the highest career thing you could aspire to.

It was always extremely confusing, cause like, Amazon, Apple, Google - I get those, they actually have things they work on, I'm sure working on AWS or like the internals of Google Search has to be interesting for a CS person, but fucking Facebook? The fuck does Facebook do? What unsolved technical challenges lie in a message board? Same goes for Netflix.