> Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good.

The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up.

> What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?

That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary.

> Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive.

No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.