I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
nit: that's my family's joint income. My individual income is at https://www.jefftk.com/money
(I've been putting my income online since 2008 when my salary was $65k. https://www.jefftk.com/p/salary-publicy for why I think more people should share their incomes.)
Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to take it, even if people call me evil.
However, the mental gymnastics to write an article like this does bother me. It's the same stuff probably everyone else in ads and other evil industries does to justify their actions. Reading something non-satirical like this makes me feel less good about the world.
The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.
Let's not blame engineers for what is effectively a political issue. If ads are an issue, let's get the law to handle it.
If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law.
There are some circumstances where you think something is wrong, but not doing it would be impossible or require really drastic life changes. For example, maybe you think driving a gas-powered car is wrong because it contributes to climate change, but you can't afford to buy an electric car or move somewhere that doesn't require a car. This is not one of those cases. The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.
The way I look at it is like so:
I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and compensating for that giving the money we make to other organizations that are definitely contributing positively. While this is better than not doing so, I think it misses out on the leverage that exists in what we build vs. the money we're paid for it.
For example, despite making over $500k last year, we know your employer thinks you are producing more value than that, because otherwise they wouldn't pay you that much. You would be a drag on their income statement otherwise. What this means is that even if you donated 100% of your salary to charity, you still aren't taking advantage of the leverage of what you can build, vs. the fixed amount you can earn.
If instead, you choose to work on something which is inherently good for society, society at large benefits from that leverage. You might be paid less, say $200k instead of $500k. But since the positive value you produce is leveraged you could be contributing, let's say, $1M of positive value for society - $200k to pay you to live in the bay area ($800k net positive value).
Just something to think about.
If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
Yes, but software skills are fairly fungible. Just because you currently work on ads doesn't mean that's all your skills are good for, or even that you need to work anywhere in ecommerce.
He specifically said he doesn't do that. Did you finish the article?
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
You’re way off base here. The author links to the Effective Altruism page on “giving to earn” one link deep in: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
This is a well established concept, the idea is that in many life situations you can maximize your positive impact by taking a well-paying job and putting that money into charity.
So the arrow of causation is the opposite to what you are claiming; starting with the desire to give to charity, what job optimizes the amount that can be given?
It’s disheartening to see the cynicism that is being directed towards someone that is transparently advocating for making the world a better place, and taking the time to put their thinking in public to seek feedback on it.