[detaro]

Because FAANG was a stock market term for "hot tech stocks", and Microsoft was old and not-hot at the time.

[redisman]

It also meant highest paying companies at one point in the engineer market which is also why it got popular. MS isn’t at the top on that metric

[swebs]

Also MS has a reputation of being a horrible place to work for:

https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-...

[jstx1]

You can find these anecdotes for every one of these companies. My perception is that Amazon has the worst reputation but I haven't done any market research or worked at any of them.

[swebs]

Yes, but bad in different ways. Amazon's reputation is that they overwork you and people only stay until their "golden handcuffs" vest. But their code quality and tooling is seen as excellent.