Notes

Nobody Ever Got Fired for Copying FAANG

There’s a famous saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. This once referred to IBM being a huge ubiquitous company that was a safe choice for being a technology vendor. Nowadays, though IBM is still a pretty large company (#42 on the Fortune 500), it’s outshined by newer larger tech companies like Facebook (#34), Apple (#3), Amazon (#2), Netflix (#115), and Google (#9). These FAANG companies share similar culture and technology and are frequently copied by other companies on things like interview process, internal tools, UX design, and compensation. I therefore propose that the 2020 version of this saying is “Nobody ever got fired for copying FAANG.”