"Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG companies" A pointless metric given that over the last 5+ years, Google/Apple/Amazon have had and l

"Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG companies" A pointless metric given that over the last 5+ years, Google/Apple/Amazon have had and lost that spot back and forth. It's a vanity metric and in terms of the actual business, is an abstraction. "they are the most prestigious place to work." By what criteria? If you are talking about by patents and research filed, it would be IBM (which is also the longest running firm at over a century), if its hardware one might be more impressed by SpaceX, if....etc. "Prestige" is another vanity abstraction, and isn't even prone to a metric. "Their market cap is on it's way to 10 Trillion. There's very little incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up their stock in the company." If that were as true as you state, people wouldn't leave for startups at the rate that they do. Startups wouldn't be as common in general if these big 'prestige' firms were such a thing, but the valley only in the last dozen years or so has fallen to that as 'common wisdom' when the actual habits are a lot more mundane -- NDAs and it's a small valley so people who can't keep a secret don't get hired elsewhere. That was the case in the 90s when the big players were HP, IBM, MSFT, Sun, SGI,and folks bounced from firm to firm, it was the case a decade later when folks started moving into what became the dotcom wave........