Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook
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How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?
The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive, like on TV when, near the end of a movie, you'll see an ad break every 6 minutes (at least in Australia).
I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube). It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.
How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me.
The problem with ads starts to happen when we get into behavioral targeting, remarketing/retargeting, data exchanges, etc. This is where things get a little creepy. People don't want profiles built up on them with all of their likes and dislikes so that display ads can be better served to them.
What's worse is that Google has been testing out banner ads on some of their other properties like Google Image Search, and Facebook-style ads are showing up in Gmail (see the Groupon ones?).
I'm worried that some day the Google we know and love will end up looking like Yahoo around the late 90's, littered with banner ads.
I remember people making a switch back then to Google when it was banner ad-free and had great search results.
Ads aren't always about giving people what they want or need, because there is that clever hack of creating the need in the first place. Besides, even if ads were really about satisfying existing desires, there is also the problem that people don't necessarily want or need the things that are right for them or for society.
Then this: "How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?"
And this: "How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me."
This is misleading. There may be people who object to advertising in principle, but even if you don't, if you are seriously trying to think about "moral objections", you need to at least consider what is being advertised and how it is being advertised. Instead, your comment is an example of how advertising advertises itself.
Edit: clarified for coherence
There are rare exceptions, eg someone is hiking and their toes are too cold and they think "I wish I had boots that would keep my toes warmer", then they go find an item that matches that, but I think that is a tiny percentage of the purchases.
OP didn't claim all advertisements were morally acceptable, but that there was nothing inherently wrong with the enterprise.
My counter point (http://blog.fisharefriends.us/2011/08/never-work-for-google-...) is that good ads are beneficial to businesses and consumers. Businesses need to make money to invest in future products, and advertising is a necessity to making money.
Treating advertising a way to connect suppliers with those with a need is a common, benign interpretation of what it is, but that view rests on assumptions of trust or informational parity between buyers and sellers. i.e. the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations. I don't see why we should assume that's generally true. There are plenty of counterexamples (e.g. Drug companies advertising drugs for conditions for which there is not good evidence of efficacy, and consumers being unable to evaluate the statements for themselves).
Google makes its revenue by auctioning qualified snippets of human attention. By qualified, I mean that it makes algorithmic inferences about the users demographics and intentions and uses these to bucket these snippets of attention so that they can be priced differentially. This is why Google's advertising is so much more profitable than most other forms.
At best, I think you can say that Google's advertising is neutral. The value it provides to society is determined by the qualities of the buyers and sellers.
A more skeptical view would be to point out that buyers are better informed than sellers when they enter these transactions. For example, google's search users don't get to see the price that google is charging for their attention, nor are the mechanisms by which google intends to use, say the Google+ network to improve classification transparent to us.
You can reasonably claim that it would be preposterous (or uncompetitive) for Google to reveal these mechanisms, or that Google couldn't survive such a climate of openness. Certainly their competitors are probably worse. That doesn't mean we should be any less critical.
I think that the more informed we are about how we use our attention, the better, and it's not clear that Google, or any other advertising company is automatically aligned with society in this regard.
I also don't see any mention of whether people's preferences are coherent or not.
I didn't use the words 'genuine demand', but I did talk about genuine need. This isn't a true Scotsman fallacy because I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met, and not debating what qualifies as a genuine need - which is as you say, a revealed preference.
so a 'genuine need' being met is a conversion, right? isn't that what google's algorithms and advertisers optimize for?
i think in your framework of evaluation, that makes better advertisement inherently more moral, and thus, working for a company that's trying to increase conversions an inherently moral task.
I guess I'm falling for trolls here.
you aren't being trolled, get an introductory microecon text.
QUOTE: "the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations."
both of your assertions are false. markets tend toward equilibria you disagree with. that you disagree with them doesn't make the needs "non-genuine", nor does it mean information asymmetry is a barrier to efficient markets. correcting information asymmetry is itself subject to market forces.
Where have I said anything about me agreeing or disagreeing with people's needs? Certainly not in that quote. My position is simply that Google's advertising doesn't necessarily serve the function of matching people with suppliers of what they want or need because it's an attention auction which is agnostic to the idea of need or want.
You also haven't addressed what part of what I've said is 'pontificating' or why I don't have the right to express my views.
And where the interests of advertisers and those of the ad viewers conflict, who wins? To the extent that advertisers ever win in those conflicts, then the interests of the ad viewers are not being served. And in that case, it's perfectly reasonable to question the social utility of Google's ad-serving.
But it's hard to define exactly how and when the interests of the ad viewers aren't being served. And that's where this thread gets bogged down a bit, on the question of what the ad viewers' "genuine" wants/needs are.
But I don't think we need to nail that down before we can question the social utility of the ads, because the system accommodates a set of interests (those of the advertisers) that often conflict with the interests of the ad viewers. Now, if you can reduce those conflicts, that's great, but is it really controversial that they exist?
Also, just because economists haven't found a bright line between concepts doesn't mean they aren't distinct. I think there's a distinct difference between needing food, and wanting an xbox.
In fact, we didn't even really 'need' food at all: what we needed were a few nutrients, maybe in the form of a pill. Food is a luxury, and if our stomachs disagree we can always get stomach-ectomies.
Until, of course, you find that one guy who defines the point of his existence to be the very first guy to get a billion points in Halo: a person might be in a hospital, dying anyway, and while eating may prolong his life another month, he will consider his whole existence to be a waste if you take away his Xbox; at this point the concept of objective needs totally disappears, and you end up back in the land of "differently elastic demand curves".
Take the following:
> Google+ isn’t about sharing cat pictures, it’s about serving ads. Twitter’s massive network of 140-character bits of information isn’t about connecting people across the globe or to view current trends in worldwide thinking, it’s about serving ads. Facebook isn’t about entertaining yourself with games or sharing interesting links, it’s about serving ads.
Replace every instance of "serving ads" with "making money", and the meaning is unchanged, but the naivete is more obvious. You can do that to the entire article.
Every business is about making money. Whether they make that money by selling ads, or selling a product, or selling a subscription, or whatever else is irrelevant. Making money doesn't mean that a business can't also be connecting people, or organizing the world's information, or curing cancer, or any other fulfilling goal.
The OP is making the point that, for him, the method of making money is entirely relevant to his sense of fulfillment when working for a company. He does not make the claim that a business cannot be doing lots of other cool things alongside making money - in fact, he points out that Google and Twitter and Facebook are indeed achieving fulfilling goals, but he objects to the income stream and therefore would not feel fulfilled by working for those companies. That's completely fair.
Substituting the claim of the OP about "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the entire message, and of course makes it sound ridiculous.
I don't believe substituting "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the message at all. I think it merely highlights how immature his stance is. He stated quite plainly that Twitter isn't about connecting people, that Facebook isn't about sharing links, because they are about "serving ads". The implication here is that a company which sells ads cannot do anything, which is ridiculous. He set up a strawman.
Got any links/reports to back that up? Which ads pay for what parts of what great services?
Cause it's a wonderful assumption, except the "great services" you quote hardly have any ads on them, but they are everywhere else, where they do (sort of, sometimes), get in your way.
I'm just saying. Google's advertising profits are quite mysterious. And possibly rightly so, they are a company, after all, and it's probably in their best interest not to share that data.
Except it refers statements about what great services their advertising crap exactly pays for to the realm of pure speculation.
tv advertisers don't have my email, don't know which websites I am visiting, don't know what I am searching for etc. etc.
How exactly is one chemical reaction bad, but so many other reactions good? It makes no sense.
It's like saying that human's purpose is to consume food.
Food is our way to get energy we need to do something - anything, actually. We would die without food, but are we limited to that? (Okay, some people actually are, but these are few).
Google did A LOT - probably more than any other company - to organize and structure data, make it more accessible - THAT is their purpose (and I believe Brin or Page actually told that).
Google's mission statement is: "Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Nothing in that statement necessarily presumes the use of ads to pay for it. If users said "we'd rather pay 1c per search than see ads" (and the math added up) Google would change to that instead.
I'm currently an intern at Google. Everyone knows where the money comes from, but day-to-day, engineers talk about what's best for the users, not about what's going to help connect ads. That's what the ads division is for, and that's only one of 7 product groups.
Everyone else is trying to make products to help people, and even ads feels like its helping too by finding you the products you want more quickly.
Yeah. Show me one company which doesn't have a mission statement like helping people, curing diseases, feeding the hungry...
Exxon Mobil Corporation is committed to being the world's premier petroleum and petrochemical company. To that end, we must continuously achieve superior financial and operating results while adhering to the highest standards of business conduct.
It clearly states how they intend to make money.
The plain mission statement which comes out and tells you what the company does, as if you'd never heard of them before. This is best typified by the Five Guys fast food chain's mission statement: "We are in the business of selling burgers." However, most companies will at least throw an adjective in there. I honestly like Blizzard's: "Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences... ever."
Then there's the framing mission statement, like Google's, which tries to put a context around the plain work they do. Another example is Starbucks, who claims a mission to "inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time." These are the ones that try to be aspirational.
Finally, there are the ones that seem to have been written by lawyers or legislators. These drone on endlessly are so awful they demean the dignity of the companies that have them, so I won't finger anyone to protect the guilty. However, you know for sure you're reading one about the time you halfway through and find the word "stakeholder."
So I do strongly think that no matter how interesting the problems, and no matter how good the pay one should avoid working in areas that do cause harm to others.
Unfortunately the world we live in is a bit more complicated that than one the Buddha lived in, so answering the question "Does what I do cause harm to others?" is a bit trickier to answer. I personally don't know if selling ads meets that qualification, I certainly don't think that merely making a profit does, and I don't know enough about the field to know about HFT and the like. But I do think the important thing to do is ask yourself that question, and if you aren't happy with your answer then it may be time to look elsewhere.
So I agree with you that "killing people better" does "save lives" in a sense (although no war would be the preferable option of course).
Not saying DARPA is all saint like and all but a lot of their project are meant at protecting and saving lives (heck they are funding energy research to avoid wars based on oil etc)
Just going to say without military spending we wouldn't have a lot of great things. A non military way of funding these things would be even better.
When I recommend Linux for my friends, the top two "programs" they care about are Skype and Facebook. After that, maybe Youtube.
As for the ads, yes, that's a source of revenue. If that is a dealbreaker for author, well, I had that opinion once myself. Then I graduated high school and worked for a very interesting advertising startup, learned about the origins and practice of it and how it grew up alongside print, took advantage of and sped up the development of new technologies, etc. I don't expect to convince anyone but advertising is itself a worthwhile problem.
However, after seeing comments like: I work for facebook - "advertising is itself a worthwhile problem."
and... I work for google - "People in non-advertising teams hardly ever ask 'how will this effect click-through rates?'."
Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.
The OP has a point: most advertising is a waste of time for both the advertiser and the recipient. There are many perverse incentives that skew outcomes, even leaving aside spam and scams. It's totally fine to hate bad ads.
But condemning advertising per se because most ads don't work is like condemning programming because most strings of characters don't compile.
That's a broad interpretation of "hardly"... Clearly some people in some non-advertising projects are at some point going to care about some ad metric in some way, so "never" would be inaccurate. That still doesn't mean that there's any significant amount of effort spent on non-ads people on ads performance.
If we serve more relevant ads resulting in clicks/sales/etc, we get more revenue. We get happier advertisers, and give users access to things they demonstrably want. There is a clear alignment of incentives to have good standards and to try to square that circle. There are other "crosswinds" which make this task hard, but also (to me) a very interesting optimization problem.
People can (and should) complain when we fail to do it right. But to assume the worst, or to write off the entire industry because we make money from advertising, leaves no room for a meaningful discussion.
You get your service/product built. You make a page for it. You wait for people to come check it out. Your friends drop by. Maybe you sell a few subscriptions. Then nothing.
So you start looking at ways you can spend money to get people to check out your service. You're buying ads now. And you're grateful that there are platforms like Google, Facebook, and eventually Twitter out there to help you sell your stuff and build your business.
Many years ago when google first started doing targeted ads on their search i didn't even know they were paid for ads. I thought it was just a new design and didn't think much more of it. Then i realised "sponsored ads" meant they where ads people paid for and thought it was a much better way of doing it then how some search engines where doing it (which at the time) was artificially putting paid ads higher in the results which obviously skewed your search result and turned any good search engine into total crap.
Also currently im in aus and just launching a product and the traction has been pretty good and we have done so by using direct marketing but trying to get to a more global audience we cant do it the same way as we are when we do it locally.
We cant hand out flyers, we can do newspaper ads, hell we cant even talk to the target people, the best we can do is use facebook twitter and tools like adwords and admob and if you use these tools right people take notice and it helps build your business. Im happy these things exist cause otherwise how the hell do we get the audience on the other side of the world if we dont have presence there.
As for why someone would have hostility, I can relate with him. I think it's a general opposition to consumerism needing to be in your face everywhere and the deceptive nature of it (tracking users across the web for example). Just feels "dirty."
As an extreme example, how would you like it if an unscrupulous porn site featured your face on an advertisement? Even worse, suppose a prospective client or employer saw your face on an advertisement for some banned substance. In most cases, its irreparable damage.
But this is not what Google does, or am I missing something? AFAIK, what they actually do is more akin to shopping basket analysis supermarket chains do. So my question remains: How exactly does it harm you? Has Google ever linked you in a publicly identifiable way to some product? Moreover, if you feel bothered by the way they handle things, why don't you just stop using them?
"Moreover, if you feel bothered by the way they handle things, why don't you just stop using them?" <-- as explained in my example, I can't stop prospective clients or employers using google. I certainly can stop myself, but the damage happens when others see it
But think about McDonalds. The food is grown by "farmers", the buildings were built by construction workers, the people who work there were taught by teachers, and the food was created by scientists.
Some, but not all, of those people are doing meaningful work.
Now consider the banker that renegotiates mortgages with long time customers to help them stay solvent, the politicians who stand up for constituents, the salespeople who help people find a car that will really serve them well, the lawyer that takes a pay cut to defend the accused...
Meaning is not found in what you do, but how you do it.
Heck, if it weren't for banks we'd probably live in some kind of Jane Austen world where the vast majority of the land is owned by a few super-rich families and the folks who don't inherit money have no way of getting ahead.
Maybe you were being ironic and I just took you too literally!
It's the difference between someone who INVENTS a medication, and someone who collects 5% fee any time you PURCHASE the medicine. Sure, the pharmacists might go on and on about how they are helping people, but really it's the chemists that are doing the hard work that ultimately are the ones improving your life.
There are genuinely useless, parasitic, and net-negative people out there, but none of the proposed examples (bankers, pharmacists, Google) falls into this category.
And science and teaching are only possible because of the economic surpluses generated by trade, which is again, facilitated by banking. Teachers don't work for free! If anyone threatens their final salary pensions they go on strike!
If you look at things that way, you might as well take the argument to it's extreme. Adwords doesn't actually make Google money, the payment processing system does. Are the ads just a way to get folks to use our payment processing system? Is search just a way to get folks to use our payment processing system? I don't see it that way.
Instead, I see my job as creating a search engine. I create a tool that helps people learn more about the world around them, more quickly and efficiently than they would have otherwise. For most queries, ads aren't even displayed. Making money is one way to bring more resources to that problem. So ads are a way to drive improvements in search rather than search being a way to drive eyeballs to ads. Often, the ads are a useful service in their own right which is an amazingly lucky opportunity.
In other news, I'm starting my sophomore year of high school this month.
In the end any company purpose is to make money, if you get annoyed by ads, then go work for a non-profit.
Yes, ads fund everything else. But they don't dominate. People in non-advertising teams hardly ever ask "how will this effect click-through rates?".
Let me ask you a specific question. Google navigation. It's web-based only, right? It requires Internet. It does not work in a rural area where your phone has no Internet. Why not make this application a standalone, to enhance user experience? To make user "happier"? So that it works even without Internet? Don't tell me it's not possible: many companies have done this, well before Google, so Google can do this too. The answer: Google intends to serve ads, and for this Internet is the key. You don't have an Internet connected phone? Google does not care about you: you will not see ads.
Advertising is just a "bug" in the system that a lot of companies are exploiting: it turns out you can make a lot of money by doing nearly nothing. Eventually the advertising revenue will dry up because people will become immune to it (or just smarter), and everyone will figure out some new way to monetize their services, perhaps by charging money to use them.
If you want advertising to go away, support these companies. The more ads people see, the less they'll click. And then the whole system blows up.
Do you really think so? Read up on priming ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) ) and tell me if you still think so.
Advertising works. Even if NO ONE CLICKS, it still works (brand advertising is still the lion's share of advertising spending in the world).
The brands that I respect have characteristics that advertising does not convey as well as informational marketing. I dont believe that wearing your prouct makes girls sexy, but I might believe that your German engineering is very good based on data.
I also like some adverts as cultural items, but the web has not been good at those yet.
So advertising annoys me because it is dumbed down and a waste for me, and I think that is a common geek view.
There's actually a great deal of advertising related research out there, which might make sense when you consider just how much money is floating around. Here are a few random articles from my notes, they're interesting reads (one of them might even explain why you even consider using the phrase "german engineering"):
http://businesspsych.org/articles/225.html
http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/display.asp?id=8342
http://tippie.uiowa.edu/marketing/research_papers/packaging....
Also, I don't watch TV commercials and I use AdBlock, so even if I'm buying advertised products, it's not because of subconscious conditioning. It's random chance.
Amazon's entire site can be broadly categorized as advertising, some bits of it more easily than others. Companies pay for placement at retailers like Whole Foods and labels are generally exercises in advertising. Sometimes they're hilariously named, like the "No Ads" sunscreen I remember seeing a long time ago.
Assuming you did end up there without seeing/hearing any advertising, you went in and bought products with "advertising" stamped on the front of them, right? Even store brand products have labels that feature a message the store would like you to consider. Otherwise we'd just buy things in brown cardboard boxes and stamped burlap sacks like the good ol' days.
Considering all labelling to be advertising is, as above, overextension of a reasonable definition. Although I do buy stuff out of cardboard boxes and sacks too.
I have read a lot on advertising, it is very interesting. I simply do not buy the types of product that are advertised, and I am geeky about the stuff I do buy. If advertising was aimed at me it might work, but it is not, that was the point I was making, and why I think many geeky people are averse to advertising.
My views on German engineering are from time spent in Germany, and reading.
Every "Show HN" post is targeted advertising. Every blog post about some interesting set of figures a start up discovered is advertising. Those interviews start ups do? Advertising. Hell, even job posts are advertisements.
If this is the same thing than facebook and goolge have very crapy advertising that don't work for me if i am targeted (I know because I'm not being "connected" to what I want), maybe only if i try to advertise something to someone But in that case it is very hard to use.
Actually, you aren't. I mean, you can be, but Facebook allows for highly targeted advertising. You can fine tune your ad to go out to a rather specific group of people. That you fall into that category means you might see those ads. Of course, some ads go out to as many people as possible.
As for how to put those ads on Facebook? It's easy. Go to to the bottom of the page on Facebook, and click on the Advertising link (https://www.facebook.com/ads/).
> If Advertisment works why I'm not being "connected" to what i want already.
That's a rather vague question. Advertising isn't just about connecting you with what you want. It's also about creating brand awareness. Advertising works. Just look at the world around you. Everytime a company reaches out with it's brand to the outside world, it's advertising. It's making to make it's message heard. How it's paying might be different, but it's looking to attract attention.
> And another thing; There is no need for Man in the Middle in advertising . All this can be automated by software and end peers.
I'm really not sure what you mean by man in the middle?
there can exist advewrtising as today but. there will also be this other thing that works for all, we don't have to call it advertising.
Just because it doesn't work for you on Google or Facebook doesn't mean "advertising" doesn't work. Advertising is more than just Google and Facebook.
Furthermore, your "proof" isn't proof. It's nothing, really.
Finally: "we don't have to call it advertising"
A rose by any other name is still a rose.
So far, I've only been disappointed by these troll posts.
I thought it was really clever. I bought a domain "google____.com", wrote a custom resume specifically for google, had the cupcakes delivered with the name of the website written on top (on a tiny printed chocolate coin so as to be legible)
On the day they arrived, I had about 50 hits from mountain view california, a bunch from atlanta (roughly the number that worked in this sattelite office) (screen http://i.imgur.com/ucsXO.jpg)
Then nothing but silence. I thought it was the cleverest little trick ever. Apparently XKCD had thought of it first.
Because they wouldn't fucking hire me...and I'm cool with that.
I don't see how Google and Twitter are guilty for giving people what they want. I am sure Google and Facebook would have gladly avoided the whole advertising rigmarole if they had been able to charge for their services; but the fact is, Facebook would have about 150 users now if they did that. I personally may or may not like this situation, but this is how it works.
Speaking of moral imperatives, I will say one thing for the ad-supported model: it opens up the internet to developing world markets in which people would not be able to use paid services.
It makes for a great sound bite, but it is completely and utterly wrong. To a first approximation, these internet services don't write ad copy or design ad banners, and that is where all the effort goes into figuring out how to get you to click. So don't work for an ad agency :-).
Now what the folks at Google do (I have no direct experience working at either Facebook or Twitter) is make it so that the system they have can reliably and efficiently serve advertisements into designated spots on the pages. This problem is a combination of bin packing and economic theory and systems design. Trust me when I say that the engineers working in ads (and they are a small fraction of the company) probably don't care at all whether or not you 'click' they care that they can see the query/page, do the auction, and provide an ordered set of results in under a few hundred milleseconds. But lets talk about clicking for a moment.
Ads are a 'tax'. They are a way to subsidize something so that it costs the consumers less. They do that by selling access to the consumer's eyeballs. Taxes, like prices, influence consumer behavior (just ask any town in California (8.75% sales tax) borders Oregon (0% sales tax)). So the upper limit on ads (as a tax) is when they start driving consumers away.
Like many people I find that some advertising levels are intolerable. I used to regularly read some gaming web sites until the tax of dealing with all the advertising became too high. (even with Adblock for web sites, or arriving at the theatre 10 - 15 minutes post start time so that you can just see the movie, avoiding ads has a cost too). I wrote a local radio station and explained to them that a particular ad they played caused me literally to change the station when they played it, generally leaving me on their competitor's station. You can't tax your way into a successful business model, and if you can't afford to offer the service with a combination of upfront cost and tax then you just quit while you are ahead.
The original post reminded me of John Cuzack's line in "Say Anything" - 'I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.'
If you agree that this restatement adequately captures your claim then I'd like you to consider the difference between "creating a desirable web site", versus "getting someone to click on an ad."
Using examples, someone who designs an advertisement to 'appear' underneath my mouse as my mouse traverses a trigger point is "trying to get me to click", whereas someone who designs a web page on widgets which includes an advertisement for something associated with widgets off to the side, they are not working on 'trying to get me to click.'
My claim is that engineers at Google (and presumably Facebook and Twitter) are working on making your experience with their products the best it can be. This increases the number of people who use their products, and if the probability of someone clicking an advertisement is fixed, the higher traffic rates will result in more clicks. And yet, unlike the original author's posting, they worked not on 'getting people to click' rather they were working on 'being more useful to more people.'
Its important to remember that advertisements are not 'evil', not even a little bit evil. I used to subscribe to BYTE magazine and Computer Shopper in part to get access to the advertisements. These represented companies who had things I would likely want to purchase and knowing about them was a service, not a burden. The consumer 'cost' of advertising relates to how much the consumer cares that its 'part of what they are looking for' or not.
Abusive use of advertising decreases your readership which reduces the rate your desirability as an advertising platform. Its a negative value coefficient in the feedback loop so it self corrects.
If you are working on Google's search engine, you are actually making the world's body of knowledge more easily accessible. This is a huge boon to the millions (or billions?) of people who use Google's free search engine every day. Arguably, many engineers can have a bigger positive impact on the world working at Google than they could have on their own.
Similarly, Facebook allows millions of people to connect and communicate. Remember the revolution in Egypt? It started on Facebook.
So yes, I agree that it is sad that so many smart people are working on how to serve ads more effectively. But the reason these internet companies serve ads is because they need to pay for the engineers and server farms that provide a service, which "nobody" is willing to pay for in cash. If you think you can do better (provide the service without covering the costs with advertising) please do, but until you demonstrate that this is possible, I think we'll have to take the bad with the good.
The number one 'core value' at Google is "Focus on the user and all else will follow". From what I've seen that holds pretty true across the company.
If it isn't a product that people love to use there won't be anybody to show ads to. If it's a product people do love to use, the people who work directly on the ads system will figure out how to serve up effective ads.
From my perspective, it's not functionally different from when I worked at companies with a more traditional sales model. In either case my job is to create a product that is compelling to users. Whether the users pay with cash or 'pay' by clicking on ads my job and my focus are the same.
My job is to make users happy. Period.
Dont hand over a significant chunk of your productive career. Just use them to sharpen your own saw.
Back to the matter at hand---finding work...hard work...that is fulfilling is not easy, but I think it is worth it. Many people find this outside of what they do for a living, so the only criticism of this piece I have is that it suggests that it is ONLY possible to find fulfillment through the thing you do to pay the rent and put food on the table.
I've seen OPower's website. I like it. This is a great idea, and I'm happy to see it take off, so I can see this being very fulfilling work - perhaps the most important work of a lifetime, way more unique and special than one of Google's foot soldiers. But not everyone has that chance, that opportunity, a role like that, and yet everyone has the chance, the opportunity to orient themselves to seek out what is fulfilling to them, to lead a meaningful life, which often involves changing jobs! And I don't think the author understands that this is a universal drive, something which transcends the place of employment.
That said, most internet companies do deliver some modicum of usefulness to their users, as a byproduct of selling their eyeballs to advertisers (which is the actual product).
I used to work on a product search engine. I had four, count them four distinct groups I had to please with my shopping search engine.
The first group was the user. If the users didn't like our site, find the item they were looking for, and buy it, we didn't make money and I got fired.
The second group were the merchants. The merchants wanted our fire hose of traffic to always be pointed at each of them individually, all the time, always increasing. If the merchants didn't like the traffic we were sending them and ended our relationship, we didn't make money and I got fired.
Also up there was the Googlebot, a customer of its own. If the Googlebot didn't like our site, it wouldn't send any traffic to us, we wouldn't send any traffic to our merchants, we wouldn't make any money and I would get fired.
Finally was the sysadmin. The sysadmin was the only guy who actually had to run the software I wrote. If he wasn't happy with it, our site would go down in the middle of the night, he wouldn't be able to get it back up without waking me up in the middle of the night, and I would feel really bad, and maybe even get fired.
The world isn't black and white. You can serve many masters. Some days what's better for the user takes priority, some days what's better for the sysadmin takes priority. Some days you smack a giant ass banner ad on the top of the site, other days you take down the giant ass banner ad because it's slowing down your site and driving users away and costing you more money than it brings in. There are gradations between the white-gloved consummate servant to the user and packing your users into the chute to get sheared, chopped, battered and fried.
The "users are products" meme is just so goddamn emo-sophomoric-simplistic-annoying. Blarghch.
Try using a local crime mapping tool, like California's Megan's Law offender database.
because there are no systematic metrics to tell how much and in what fashion these data apps are being used, the government has no ability to tell if their apps are actually effective. Furthermore, there's no near-term incentive to improve these tools because no profit margin depends on these apps actually being used.
The author here should be commended for his idealism, but that doesn't warrant the viewpoint that money-making mechanisms serve no beneficial purpose besides a company's bottom line.
Google, Facebokk, Twitter, and anyone else who wants to make a dime off of advertising has 1 goal that should always be higher on their priority list than serving up ads...getting more users and keeping them happy. Without the massive scale of users that these companies have, who would care how many ads they are serving.
I know what I am saying is all very obvious, but I think there are far more people inside those companies that are aiming to solve and inovate on problems within the user space rather than just the ad space.... just IMHO.
b) Advertising can (and should) get much better than it is. In the ideal form you would never see an ad until the moment you needed what it was selling and at that point the advertised product would be exactly what you needed. Working towards that goal is interesting, and teaches us at least as much about human intelligence as all the research in AI labs over the last 25 years.
The real challenge (and problem) for some engineers is that your user is not your customer.
The joy of interacting with customers which are actually paying for things you made for them is sometimes priceless.
Also when working for Google, Twitter, or Facebook you might never learn how to envision and build the product (and company from it) which is sold directly to the customer.
So don't expect the next Oracle, Informatica, or Apple coming from ex-Googlers (even they have a lot of engineering knowledge in that space).
(from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098258/quotes?qt=qt0367508, or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEgu7jdc_fs).
If advertisers are freely willing to pay for the web services I use eventhough I don't bother with ads myself, it's more than ok.
If there are enough suckers who actually buy that stuff to keep the advertisers' budgets on black so that they can keep paying for the web services I use, it's more than ok, too.
In neither case, I'm not the sucker and I still benefit from the scheme despite the fact that I don't even do anything, except run adblock.
In other words, regardless of all these great things Google is doing and great technology, if somebody invents better ad market than AdSense, all this great technology will not help them at all. That is the problem.
For example: let's say I'm looking for "Animal Farm" online. An ad for the book "1984" might actually create value in this case.
You might not work for the big three for "these reasons", but i doubt that anyone else would even think about reconsidering their wish to work/job there.
I’m not saying that my code needs to save the world or support
humanitarian causes, but it should at least be something that I like,
or I would use, or that I care about.
so i have to look at a couple of (non-intrusive, often related to my interest) ads, in order to pay for my access to any bit on information from anywhere in the world, in single-digit milliseconds?
and btw, google's self-driving cars? toootally about freeing-up more of your time to be able to watch even more ads -- because today, i don't look at ads (billboards) while i am driving..
(ask me why advertising is the only way to pay for a service like search at a scale like the internet -- with transaction costs and all that)
Also, consider that to the extent that these projects are open-sourced or otherwise widely available, they create external value. Go will not be solely used by Google, though it may have been created to serve Google's aims. Likewise for whatever messaging system Twitter built this week.
Everything is not so simple; we use their (amazing) products, we pay by clicking ads. And it is useful for society as a whole (Google, Twitter and Facebook).
I am 100% sure that not even half of the programmers who work at Google are working in the "deliver ads" area. Many of them are working in a little piece of something that does something that someone else is going to find really useful... just like millions of people in earth!
* that tv license they have in the UK is whack.
From over here in the United States, it looks like it's not such a terrible thing. The BBC manages to produce great programming and content, and the license is much less than what the typical US consumer pays for cable.
But the fact remains that whomever takes a stand one way or another on advertising is just deluding themselves. It's always been with us, it's how we communicate with each other.
Actually, I say "unfortunately", but I would actually be okay with it. The Beeb has some amazing content. But there are definitely more than a couple people with TVs who have no interest in cable (or BBC) subscriptions.
You only have to pay the license if you're watching live TV. If you don't own a TV or if your TV isn't tuned to terrestrial channels, you don't have to pay. Even if you're not paying, you still get access to loads of great radio stations and a fantastic website AND on-demand catchup of all BBC programmes on iPlayer. The license is only for live TV.
You have the option of saying you don't need a license, in which case they send someone around to make sure you aren't lying. This is how it is currently at my place (althought they never got around to sending their van over..)
That's the whack part I was alluding to.