It was actually about the stocks. Microsoft wasn’t a part of it because they weren’t “new”. I’m pretty sure Microsoft is actually in the new tech-stock-group.

After it was popularized as a group of tech stocks to buy, people just used it to talk about the biggest software companies, and a lot of devs I talked to (myself included) kinda implied Microsoft when we said FAANG. And while those companies did tend to pay higher than other devs, I think it’s pretty understood that comes with expectations and stress. None of my dev friends would ever wanna work in that environment.