Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Lisp aside, I found something tragic, or at least a terribly tragic phase to their career: They stayed at JPL because it was a more meaningful place to work and abhorred the possibility of Java drudgery. Fine, good.

Then they went to Google, as it appeared different from the corporate bureaucratic programmer = widget approach, only to be charged with implementing a massive Java project. So, irony.

But the real tragedy was that it was all for Ad Tech. Presumably tired of the same JPL work, they not only end up using a hated tool, but also working on something that seems on the opposite end of the "meaningful work" spectrum. Adding to the tragedy, they could have taken any number of development jobs that happened to use Java and yet pushed the needle forward on meaningful work.

I really regret the last 20 years of the best & brightest being drawn into the modern equivalent of Mad Men advertising firms. I do however take a fair bit of solace in the fact that these massive companies and massive systems have resulted, if only as a side effect, in excellent technology that allows corralling and orchestrating massive amounts computational power in a way I thought a bit too "utopian" when "utility computing" was being bandied about in the 90's. Just kind of wish some other monetization model had emerged. Freemium looked promising for a while, but it turned out there was still an infinity of user acquisition friction in between "free" and "extremely cheap". Oh well. I still have hope for the next decade or so.

Ugh. I understand exactly what you're talking about here.

I work in SoCal for a smaller aerospace firm. According to glassdoor, the pay is pretty decent (a little above average for a software engineer out here), but it really pales in comparison to the numbers I hear people mention when talking about "FAANG" lol.

The cost of living is not less. If you want a 30 minute commute, be prepared to pay through the arse for a 50 year old house in need of serious repairs.

The traffic is an atrocity. I grew up in the Bay Area and never in my life have I seen anything like this.

The benefits can vary from garbage to decent. Where I work, there's free lunch, free dinner, and free (really good) health insurance. OTOH, some other companies have "coffee clubs" and "water clubs" where groups of coworkers donate money to have a monthly supply of water/coffee in their office space.

Oh yeah, and no matter what, if you say you work on space stuff, everyone assumes you work at spacex or nasa. There are no exceptions. lol.

Edit: I realize I probably forgot the upshot. Yeah, this kinda work is pretty darn cool! I also really enjoy doing it, or I'd go work on something else.

Complete tangent but ... you grew up in the bay area, currently live in socal ... but you spelled it "pay through the arse" like I (a .uk resident) would.

Care to explain why? No big deal, but my linguistic curiosity is piqued.

I see "arse" used on occasion here in the US as a way to make "ass" sound milder. It's like using "darn" instead of "damn", munging the pronunciation. In either case, the cultural exchange goes both ways.

We say "arse" here to be less crass.

That's funny, because calling someone an "ass" can be euphemistically explained away as just saying they're a donkey, while "arse" is unambiguously anatomical.

But it's more British, and therefore classier. Because that's definitely how these things work, somehow.

I think sometimes arse is used in a sort of ironic sounding way here.

In general though, outside of this one, a lot of things that somes get described as British use turn out to be things that I would also say. Sometimes there are regional differences in the US, or sonetimes it might even vary with the individual. The patterns of who says what aren't always so neat and organized as "this is always American, this is always British."

I myself have one parent who was born in England and immigrated here fairly young, and I sometimes wonder if or assume that's a factor for me.

I guess it’s a suicide to point this out on HN, but not everyone thinks Ad Tech is the opposite of meaningful work. I think it’s a very “limited imagination” point of view if you a) can’t think of anything less meaningful that people spend their time on, b) can’t think of any upside that Ad Tech brings. I’m happy to elaborate, having worked on ad tech for over 3 years, in case this comment doesn’t get downvoted into oblivion.

I honestly couldn’t think of a positive thing for adtech. Do share

How do you think all of the startups on here really achieve the "viral" growth they all talk about? Heavily targeted ads have allowed niche businesses to get off the ground and become profitable in a way that was not previously possible. Agreed there are problems, and agreed they don't allow much(if any) real control over the targeting from the target's side of things, but to say that don't do any real good is unimaginative as the previous comment said.

It is doing the great and worthy work of connecting consumers with the products they desire.

That's neither great nor worthy.

A truly good product sells itself. All advertising is just manipulation.

"A truly great product sells itself" is one of the most persistent myths engineers believe.

I don't understand how people can still believe this when it's so obviously false. It's a nice story, that if you make something great you'll get what you deserve. That sounds fair, but there's no reason to believe the market works this way.

A "truly great product" that no one (or not enough people) know about will go out of business and disappear.

Good advertising is just communication.

A truly good product sells itself.

That's completely absurd. How can a product "sell itself" if nobody knows it exists, or knows how great it is? How do they find out those things? Well, in part, by advertising.

I heartily agree that some advertising is manipulative and anti-social... but I can't buy this "all advertising is just manipulation" stuff.

The problem is with global brands that continue to advertise anyway. You can make the "discovery" argument for upstarts and niche businesses, but when Coke or Exxon are advertising to me, there is no pretense of giving me information I didn't already have. At some point it's purely about associating one's product with vaguely positive imagery and embedding it just a little bit deeper into everyone's consiousness. No end-consumers benefit from that.

There is probably some component of that in advertising, but most of it is about selling people Thneeds.

I think this statement satisfies a working definition of irony: about half the audience is in on the joke, and the other half earnestly believes it. I guess that's also true of trolling. Kudos, I suppose.

BITD, the idea was going to be that ads would connect commercial offerings to people who would actually appreciate them... Hasn't really worked out that way, though.

1. Ad tech is a product which ~10 million businesses and people online are willing to pay for (over $100B/year), for several years now. It’s extremely unlikely that it provides no positive effect to all these customers. 2. Ad Tech is trying to make advertising experience better (even if it might be failing at the moment). People working on it believe that more relevant ads are a better experience (or less annoying), than completely irrelevant ads (which you can easily find on traditional TV or in print media). 3. AdTech (which GP kinda mentioned) pays for a lot of things that are available for free and likely wouldn’t be otherwise, including open source software development (Angular, React) and technology such as video calling or video publishing.

Serious question: do you use an ad blocker when browsing the internet?

Edit: I ask that because I use an ad blocker, as does everyone that I know. And I can’t think of a way to reconcile blocking ads with truly believing that ads are good for me.

I am strongly anti-advertising, but I always like to hear from people with an opposite point of view.

I work in publishing. Multiple times I have seen developers who were running ad blockers and then had trouble figuring out why their own sites weren’t loading properly.

No, I have never used an ad blocker, and I know plenty of people who aren’t bothered to either.

I am pretty UX-focused, but I don’t frequent any sites were I would think: god, this is unusable because of the ads. (I do find sites where UX is bad for other reasons)

My current biggest annoyance is that I was trying to hack something on iOS, opened bunch of medium articles and now I am being forced to pay for it, which I’m pretty sure would not be warranted given my usage of it. (I do pay for other services where provided value outweighs cost, like say Spotify). I’d take ad-supported Medium over pay-wall Medium any day (as a customer, maybe as a producer ads would not be a viable model).

1. Ad tech is a product which people are willing to pay for. It’s extremely unlikely that it provides no positive effect to all these customers.

I'm talking about positive effects to "the world" / society / the public at large. Obviously not to the people getting their pockets filled.

2. Ad Tech is trying to make advertising experience better

No, they're trying to make more money. Whether they do so by making the advertising "experience" (I loathe that freaking word) better or worse it's irrelevant.

3. AdTech (which GP kinda mentioned) pays for a lot of things that are available for free and likely wouldn’t be otherwise

Slavery pays for a lot of cheap or free things as well, so that's not a really good argument in of itself, is it?

You don't sound like a person capable of being persuaded by anything (using strawman arguments about slavery is a pretty good sign of that) but I have in the past sold non-software products and the simplest option to promote them is stuff like adwords/adsense.

The alternative would be dealing with magazine ads and the like which is a whole different profession I would have to learn. Companies have whole departments to deal with that headache. And probably the 1000+ dollar budget involved would be beyond my scale.

How about lax environmental regulations in developing countries leading to cheaper products paid for by ecological wastelands? That should be enough to get over that particular rhetorical hangup although you don't sound like you're capable of being convinced in this case either because your convenience depends on a barrage of information aimed at everyone unlucky enough to pass by a computer screen (or go outside).

Regardless, the GGP's arguments are specious, circular, and delusional. The fact that the GP used slavery as an example doesn't take away from that. (And yes I get the irony of this post, advertising is that hill I chose to die on).

>I'm talking about positive effects to "the world" / society / the public at large. Obviously not to the people getting their pockets filled.

People buying stuff from those businesses must at least think they are benefitting from the transactions in some way.

I ad-block everything I possibly can, or pay for non-ad versions of media, and I don't think I'm missing out on anything.

Obviously I can't block everything, but I'm having trouble coming up with some kind of improvement to my life that not ad-blocking would bring me.

People like all kinds of ads. Super Bowl? People watch for the ads. People cut out clever magazine ads and use them as posters. Instagram “influencer”? That means you’re doing a product placement ad and people love it. Jingles: we sing ‘em. MailChimp podcasts ads. All kinds of ads.

You know what kind of ads no one has ever ever ever liked? Web ads. Banner ads. Pop ups, pop unders, takeovers. They’re all shit, consumers hate them, and consumers love ads in general. It’s a failed business model that has never been viable for publishers.

> 2. Ad Tech is trying to make advertising experience better (even if it might be failing at the moment).

Oh my.

Youtube's current business model essentially breaks all ad-supported classical music content on the site. It does this by interrupting the music in the middle of a piece to insert an add. That means a long piece like a Wagner opera is littered with tens or perhaps even a hundred tiny adds that cut jarringly into the piece in the middle of acts, sections, and even phrases. It's not possible to concentrate on a piece of classical music that way. Your ad tech industry has destroyed whatever segment of content ad-supported classical music on youtube represents.[1]

But that's not my complaint.

I'm watching television the other day and I come upon some classic movie that I hadn't seen in awhile. I start to watch for about five minutes; then, in the middle of a scene, the movie switches to a loud, short commercial. In the middle of a scene! I thought maybe the channel got changed by accident. But no-- this was a youtube-sized commercial doing a youtube-sized jump-cut into a television program.

I kept watching and sure enough, every subsequent commercial used a jump cut in the very middle of dialogue, and every commercial was as short as the ones on Youtube. Now this movie was almost as unwatchable as youtube classical music is unlistenable.

So your ad tech has managed to do something I didn't think was possible-- become a big enough influence on commercial television programming so as to make it even more painful to watch. That's much worse than just "failing at the moment."

[1] Sometimes it appears that the ad-placement algo inserts ads at the next available silence. But that still destroys all kinds of music. For example, many long classical pieces are made up of short-- yet related-- variations separated by silence. Inserted loud, obnoxious sounds between every single variation is no more acceptable than blaring an air horn between each move in a chess game. Edit: on the Brahms Paganini variations I listened to the algo seemed to be every other variation. But that hardly matters.

> Youtube's current business model essentially breaks all ad-supported classical music content on the site.

that strikes me as a bit of a stretch, given that YouTube sells a premium subscription, which gives you a 100 percent ad-free experience.

don't like ads? (i don't!) pony up US$12.99 a month to get rid of them.

i have had a premium youtube account since the month they were announced, and boy do i ever believe i am getting my money's worth. so much stuff on there, by so many creators.

I do most of my YouTube viewing from a desktop so my ad blocker stops me from seeing ads. However I recently signed up for YouTube premium because I am very anti-advertising, and I want to vote with my wallet.

I hope that more services allow me to pay in return for removing ads.

> it appears that the ad-placement algo inserts ads at the next available silence

Silence is a part of music like darkness is a part of a painting. To assume that it's "space to fill" is testament to either enormous naivety about or complete disregard for the content itself.

Addressing your number points:

1) An appeal to the popularity of ad tech is not a sufficient argument in this case. First, it is tautological: At issue from my original comment is the sheet volume of talent it has attracted. Implicit within that is popularity. As such, you cannot use popularity to justify the phenomena.

2) Nor is the belief of people working in the field that it is useful a compelling argument. And of course it is trying to make advertising a better experience etc. But that just says "if it has to exist, it might as well be good at its job" and doesn't provide show a prima facie argument for it to begin with.

For both 1 & 2, you could easily replace Ad Tech with military equipment and arms dealers. I'm not saying one is as bad as the other. I'm saying the flaws in the arguments become more apparent.

3) This, I think, is where we agree. But I think alternate business models, had they rose to prominence instead, might have been better for society. But counter-factuals are inherently difficult to prove, and it's certainly possible we'd be in a worse state had things worked out differently.

Please elaborate and also please always feel free to do so!

Thinking of things less meaningful doesn’t suddenly make something meaningful in the general sense. Both can still be pretty meaningless when it comes to advancing society long term.

Optimal auction algorithms for ad placement can be interesting technical work and there can be some interesting economics work in there for price discovery, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not very meaningful to the broader world. You won’t be getting a Nobel prize and your kids and grandkids won’t even be impressed with what you do.

Side note: don’t talk about downvotes coming for your post. It’s a sure way to ensure it and it’s boring.

You present a false dichotomy to represent my view as one end of "ad tech bad" with the other "ad tech good" or something along those lines. However when contrasted with helping explore the solar system and helping to build an ad-bidding platform, I think there's a clear winner in which pushed humanity forward as a civilization.

You also attribute to me beliefs I don't state. Lamenting the tremendous talent that has gone into ad tech instead of what I would consider more worth while endeavors doesn't mean I don't value it at all. Ad tech has facilitated robust sets of nominally "free" tools that certainly have some value.

My opinion of the field, however, is that the "hard" problems it contains are neither as hard nor as meaningful as other areas that have attracted less talent. It seems you'd like to attribute to me opinions that are "black or white", but I'm afraid my views on things are not so simple, and as such not so easy a subject for simple rebuttal.

I’m glad that this your view, thanks for the clarification. You did literally write that ad tech is on the “opposite end of meaningful work spectrum”, and we both agree that space exploration is certainly on the positive end of it. This literally mirrors the definition of black and white (ends of the color spectrum).

I am sure you are right in that there areas that would deserve more talent given their impact. Care to elaborate which ones stand out in your mind? (Besides space exploration?)

Perhaps they weren't so bright after all.

I don't doubt their intelligence or talent in solving problems. But chasing the highest Total Compensation, or glittering silicon jewel, or a comforting workplace that closely resembled the social & work dynamics they'd just graduate from in college... they were comfortable choices to make. Even chasing money losing startups for the first decade of your career always held the prospect of an off-ramp to one of the established players. Chasing work that moves the needle forward on culture, society, and civilization often requires a higher tolerance for risk and discomfort.

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