Actually, I don't. And I never saw one during the ten years I worked there. So I got curious.
I asked some old time Microsoft employees about it. I got comments like, "I never saw a FYIFV T-shirt. I heard them discussed as something that people saw as over the top, a fun idea but too provocative," and, "It was never a button. Someone (who will remain nameless) talked about putting it on a t-shirt, but I never actually saw it end up on a shirt."
So why does this rumor keep popping up?
"A popular button appeared with the initials FYIFV: Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested" - Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates, Doubleday, January 1993.
I should explain what the quote refers to. Microsoft employees are granted stock option grants when they start working there. Actually not all employees, just the programmers and other employees who are deemed worthy. The options vest - become available to be exercised - following a set schedule, so that after 4 1/2 years all of the initial options can be exercised. Since an option allows the employee to buy stock at the price when the option was granted, and the stock generally will have risen in that period of time, the employee can buy the stock cheap and sell it on the open market, pocketing some nice change. So FYIFV would imply that the employee had been there long enough for his or her initial grant to vest, could generate piles of cash in a hurry, and therefore had to answer to no one.
For example, the quote above refers to the jubilation felt when Microsoft went public and people started cashing in stock. Well, I guess, although do you really believe that people would wear buttons that in effect said, "I'm richer than you?" Of course, we are talking about Microsoft people, so I can understand why it sounded believable.
There's another reason to doubt it, which is that employees (all employees, nowadays, even those who didn't get initial grants) are granted more options each year. These are usually less than the initial grant, but still this notion, that after 4 1/2 years the employee has gotten all the option money he or she is going to get, is simply false. Employees are never "fully vested," because the new option grants are vesting over time also.
"Realize that the primary motivator for employees of dominant commercial OS vendors is money (note buttons worn by Microsoft employees that read 'FYIFV', you can search around on the Web yourself to figure out the acronym)." - Chris McDonough, "Countering The No-Support Argument for Linux and Other Open Source Software Offerings" web page.
A quote like this one is a little more ominous. Now it is being used to imply that Microsoft employees are money-grubbing individuals and that this attitude extends into their motivation to write software. Someone who wore an FYIFV button is obviously not motivated by any sense of altruism, and merely wants to separate people from their cash as quickly as possible, software quality be damned.
"For years, Softies were wont to sport buttons that read FYIFV: Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested." - John Heileman, "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth", Wired, November 2000.
Now you are hitting a bit too close to home. This sentence is in an article about the Justice Department lawsuit about Microsoft (the same quote appears in Heileman's book, Pride Before the Fall, based on the Wired article). The FYIFV button is being used to show that Microsoft employees are basically mean people, capable of anything including illegal monopoly extension. The paragraph leading up to that reads, "Extending a long middle finger to the government and your competitors is not conventional behavior among the top executives of most blue-chip companies. But, of course, Microsoft was different - self-consciously so. Populated by an army of young men (mainly), most of them unusually bright, many of them abnormally wealthy, working endless hours and pulling frequent all-nighters, Microsoft has always retained the air of a fraternity - a fraternity of rich eggheads, but a fraternity nonetheless."
So let me use this article as an attempt to debunk this myth. I received one somewhat definitive email about the origin of the phrase:
[Person X] is adamant that he NEVER made or wore an FYIFV button or T-Shirt. The story he tells is that he made a comment to the effect that some person was wearing their FYIFV T-Shirt that day, meaning that that person was being intransigent about something or other. The intended audience apparently understood that this was an entirely metaphorical reference, but someone else, not involved in the conversation, apparently overheard the crack and related it to Bill [Gates], misreporting the story by saying that [Person X] had actually made such a T-Shirt. [Person X] got called onto the carpet for this by Bill, who was skeptical that no such shirts actually existed and that [Person X] wasn't involved in their making. I had dinner with [Person X] that evening, and remember it well.
I only ever saw one actual FYIFV shirt. The person made it themself and wore it only on their final day at MS. This was maybe '92 or so, years after the original incident.
OK, so someone heard the story themselves and made up ONE shirt as a joke. It was never meant to imply all the things it has been taken to imply. Now I am not claiming that Microsoft is populated by a bunch of saints. They are as obnoxious and egotistical as anyone else, and they certainly do stroll around the hallways in Redmond with some rude T-Shirts and buttons, bearing slogans aimed at various competitors.
But FYIFV? No way.
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