alt Hacker News> FAANG
And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.
There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.
It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.
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People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.
Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.
It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.
It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.
And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.
... after Nvidia.
That’s because FAANGs are successful due to monopolization and network effects. Not by the quality of their work.
This is especially true for Meta.