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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

> grinding away at a FANG

I've started to propose we s/FANG/Big N/g "FANG" leaves off other obvious big companies, e.g. Uber, and it wouldn't scale to keep trying to add them to the acronym. Here N is used like when one talks about a list "N items long"

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Uber and Lyft don’t belong on any “Big N” list until they show a profit rather than pissing away billions a year.

But that highlights the inconsistent usage of the term. Often it's used to just mean "a company with a lot of engineers with similar practices and culture"

How much profit does Amazon show?

Amazon made $2.62 billion in the last quarter, and $3.5 billion the quarter before that.

Amazon makes a ton of money, and (quite transparently I might add) they plow a lot of their earnings from some of their businesses into investing into their other businesses, which is what most investors want.

This is completely different from Uber and Lyft, where it's not clear that their profit potential supports their current valuations.

Amazon has demonstrated its ability to show a profit. Uber and Lyft have not.

If the acronym is only about profit then it is both misused and excludes other obvious companies like Microsoft.

It’s not entirely about profit, but I would argue you have to show a profit, or, demonstrate you could show a profit like Amazon has, to be considered a “top company” in any sense.

How does it exclude Microsoft, who reported $8.4 billion net income for Q2 2019?

Does it seem odd to exclude Microsoft from FAANG when it's the largest?

MAGA - Microsoft Apple Google Amazon:

Edit:

I just realized what else that stood for...

It's fine, we'll print the message on hats so people know were talking about something else haha.

It's okay. Might as well settle into the next 5 years and try to have a good time. Lots of people are.

Exactly

I agree, I guess I just meant "enterprise" - the purpose of including FANG was to call out that there's nothing particularly distinguished about working for those companies, the workloads are very similar to ABC enterprise workloads these days.

NOFANG?

FAAUN-G

FAAN.+G

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