Ads have existed long before clicks on and the most talented artists have worked on them long before the most talented programmers thought about making people click on them.
Artists at ad agencies probably never broke even top twenty jobs by salary.
Now, to be clear, I don't consider GMail "ad tech", even though it is ad supported. I don't see anything wrong with someone like Google want to drive traffic through services that are monetized through advertising. Nor Facebook for that matter.
I will complain about lock in, dark patterns, and other nefarious things. But you can have good ad supported services without necessarily having all of the bad things. Those just bump your margin and revenue.
So, if you feel that the "good" programmers are working on ad tech and analysis, while the "less good" are working on, say, GMail proper, I'd be curious in how that conclusion was drawn.
How many people here work on ad tech directly? (vs, some dual use technology that can be used for ad tech.)
I know a lot of people, tangentially, indirectly, "6 degrees of separation" kind of thing, and I don't know any of them being directly involved in ad tech. None of the "lead geeks" I'm familiar with are in the field.
The closest it got was a friend of mine who worked on Farmville in its heyday, and that's more a dark pattern addiction game than ad tech.
Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2].
Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/