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slvng

The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.

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they either:

a) don't care

b) were desperate enough at the time, then, like that damn videogame, it sucked him in

it's too easy to get carried away by sheer technical complexity of optimization tasks, even if you are optimizing for bad.

Or were paid handsomely?

That is really sad.

They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.

Well, nobody needs Google-level money...

I would like to add they waated their time on something evil, not useless. Can’t say I blame them too much for cashing that check, though.

Why is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.

You can create a lot of profit for your employer whilst contributing nothing to society or even be detrimental to it. Money has no bearing on that.

They can take the skill to any other employer and improve performance for others elsewhere. Think of all the seconds you could get back to do more meaningful things if more websites were fully optimized. It may sound silly but it snowballs into minutes, hours, and days.

I think most jobs contribute positively to the society. Not much, for sure, but they contribute.

Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.

Yeah this is no different from someone optimizing literally any other performance bottlenecks in ANY other web project.

Yea, and the scale of impact on the economy of those micro seconds is probably huge

Before tech became the go-to big money job, there was a well-worn stereotype of electrical engineering grads going to Wall Street instead of an EE-centric job.

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