Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?
The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other.
I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation.
edit:
There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level.
Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills.
Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.
Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
More likely, at the risk of overgeneralizing, I suspect a lot of the people going into adtech aren't really the philosophical-type (I think those probably tend to avoid marketing in general), a lot of them are young, and probably excited just to get a job offer in such a well-paying, high-profile industry.
I think you're right, that a lot of the people going into AdTech, and just marketing in general, aren't philosophical. But, you saying that made me chuckle, because I have a BA in Philosophy, and no computing qualification.