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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

I usually use FAAMG instead of FAANG because I don't understand what Netflix is doing in there.

Netflix is large enough and pays well enough that it frequently poaches developers from the others on the list. And they poach from it back.

Depending on what you're discussing when you're listing those companies, it may make sense to include them.

Lol good on you for not just dropping the N, but there's actually a person who coined this, and he coined 'FANG' to describe a set of stocks that at the time were appreciating very quickly. Netflix was both the smallest and the first to slow of that group, so that's why they now seem out of place.

>I usually use FAAMG instead of FAANG because I don't understand what Netflix is doing in there.

FAANG is about the pay, not the prestige of the company. They pay so far above the rest of the market that they are really only competing for talent with themselves. Average total comp at Netflix is well north of $500k for an individual contributor.

Then does Amazon belong there? I didn’t get the impression it’s at the level of the others, but closer to Microsoft.

Amazon is lower than Google, FB, and Netflix, but still quite a bit higher than MS. According to levels.fyi for engineers all at the same level (~5ish YOE):

- MS: $185k

- Amazon: $230k

- Google: $267k

This is the middle to lower end of Amazon L5 comp for an SDE. I don’t know about the other companies - it might be mid to lower end for them as well or maybe high end depending on where they hire at.

Don't think those MS numbers are accurate, esp. once you throw in GitHub and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is definitely higher (dunno about GitHub), but in almost every discussion I've seen about comps, LinkedIn is always talked about separately from MS. On levels.fyi, for example, LinkedIn is in it's own section separate from MS.

Lower than Microsoft prestige-wise.

Highly debatable. While Amazon is more likely to be on the shit-list of Joe Public, in technical circles it comes down to AWS vs MS. Frankly if MS hadn't bought GitHub to distract magpie developers, there would be no contest.

Amazon has the lowest hiring bar because of high turnover. AWS vs Azure is besides the point.

Having worked for both, I would dispute the hiring bar point - but I'm sure it is team dependent.

I’ve been curious about this. Is there a list of companies that pay way and above outside of FAANMG?

I work for a large media company as at Sr director level equivalent engineer. The pay is certainly not north of 500k

Who pays more than FANG outside of FANG?

In the U.S., financial services shops that figured out tech is money. Or, rather, that time is money and tech shrinks time. Think banks’ trading groups, hedge funds, etc.

Along with those, a larger sector of FS bitten with the transformation bug. Even in the non trading related financial services, if a company’s emphasis is on figuring out how to tech before getting eaten by challengers or juggernauts, the pay may indicate how existential the need.

On the other hand, many in the financial industrial complex haven’t realized this yet, and are still trying to “take costs out”, doing reductions in force of knowledgable workers, offshoring any roles not understood by the executives, etc., or paying bottom dollar domestically for coders and IT support, rather than well enough for software or systems engineers.

Large companies are likely to have a mix of these models all at the same time, so understand what type of group you’re looking at.

Also note that financial titles are often inverse ranks of engineering titles, with SVPs below directors and VPs as the junior-most roles.

Note(1): Pro-employee compensation disclosure laws are starting to get passed where (a) you don’t have to say what you used to earn, and (b) a company may have to disclose the comp for your role and similar roles the moment you ask, not after you make it to offer. Check the laws governing both your zip code and the company’s and know your rights to help even out information asymmetry.

Note(2): Performance multipliers are worth paying for. Automation is worth paying for. Anything thought through and written once to do work, that then does that work many times in less time, or for many people in less time, or both, is worth paying for. FANG code runs at staggering scale. FS code makes staggering money in milliseconds. Look for places where each line of code is multiplying output — how many fold drives how much that code, and its engineers, should be worth.

https://www.levels.fyi/2020/ is a decent resource. The numbers are fairly accurate, IME. You can also lurk around Blind if you want to get a sense of salaries in tech (warning though: Blind is completely obsessed with salaries, to the point where its unhealthy).

You'll actually notice that none of the FAANG are on the top 10 of that list. FAANGs definitely pay well, but these days "FAANG" is outdated, IMO. I've seen it "FAANGMULA" sometimes (FAANG + Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb) but even that still leaves out other high payers like Stripe, Box, Bytedance, etc.

I would think that Microsoft and Amazon only seem quite a bit lower because of the lower cost of living in Seattle right? Also though taking a looks at levels.fyi salary information none of the FAANG companies are really included in the top paying list.

It sounds way better in conversation.

My tongue-in-cheek definition of FAAN(M)G is "does the company have sufficient resources and technical wits to have entire team(s) dedicated to stress-testing and breaking their internal systems proactively to ensure uptime and low latency?" Netflix with Chaos Monkey definitely applies, and Microsoft does as well. Arguably Salesforce would be there too, if not for their meme-worthy historical failure at the low-latency part.

Could you elaborate on the low-latency part and the historical failure? I don't know a lot about Salesforce, so I'm not quite sure how they fit into FAANG.

People underestimate how hard it is to do streaming that well.

Has to do with blue chip tech stocks apparently

When Jim Cramer coined it (originally as FANG) and began pumping it on his show regularly, it was just a batch of large, sector dominant tech stocks he thought should be bought at that time (with the letter ordering being convenient for memory). That's all it was. There is no greater definition, and it's bizarre to see people argue over that aspect routinely on HN, given it was nothing more than a stock pumping promotion by a slightly vacuous tv bobblehead.

Yeah it's literally just a short list of companies that people see as being the big kahunas of the tech industry. In the '80s it would've been Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and maybe even companies like Lotus or WordPerfect. In the '90s it would've been more like, Intel, Microsoft, AOL, Sun, maybe Oracle, maybe still IBM? Hell maybe even Ebay. Lots of those companies are still around but the ones that are tend to be more mature, less volatile, and less influential on the rest of the industry now, and get correspondingly less press.

But yeah, that's all FAANG is and I'm amazed anyone thinks it's anything more standardized or meaningful or precisely defined. It's shorthand for the biggest and most influential companies in the tech industry at the moment, at least from the perspective of people on the outside looking in. If someone wants to the throw an M into FAANG I totally get it.

all else equal they pay more than the other 4 so yeah i get it

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