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Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.
Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
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> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did". Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the sta…
"You want doctors and researchers to be paid more than football players? Just find a way to make them more lucrative than ads." It's a rather reductive and defeatist view. There's nothing more harmful than looking at a specific state of affairs and going "eh, that's just the way the world works", as if our current economic system was an immutable law of nature.
The brightest minds are working on ad-tech, not as an immutable law of nature, but because that's where the incentives are, and if the parent commenter wants that to change, whining about how the OP isn't more charitable won't solve it, like whining that open source developers don't work on what users want instead of what they want won't change it; If it's all about incentives, we [1] should look towards finding a way to incentivise the more desired outcome.
[1] parent commenter alone, or society generally.
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The issue is, I think, "you've got analysis" vs either "you've got an analysis" (singular) or "you've got analyses" (plural). Still, pretty minor thing to nitpick about.
You're misparsing the sentence: "If you’ve got interesting technical analysis [or optimization] problems". "Technical analysis" is an adjective, not a noun.
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Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.
Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
Entire industries are taking the "best and the brightest", and wasting them on some of the most menial jobs imaginable.
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.
Someone needed to front an estimated $100k of GPU costs, without being sure it would work - and then pay for your work on top; who risked that? You had no proof the claimed Bitcoins inside were real, or as many as claimed. You're in New Zealand(?) and the customer is in Russia - you need the file to study it and if you crack it then you have the Bitcoins as well - how did they become comfortable that you wouldn't steal them and say you couldn't crack it? Did it worry you that the owner might not be able to convert them to cash, e.g. if the Exchange was shady and there was very little recourse?
How much work did it take to convince your partner to stop what they were doing, and write GPU code for a crack which might not work?
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Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
Being bored for 10 hours a day when you have the capability to do so much really is terrible. Couldn't agree with you more.
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You open a business. You sell something or offer a service. Day one is "let people know that I exist". Pretty much every form this take is advertising. No business live without making its customers aware of it. It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it. Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.
Discovery is a problem that can be solved in a million other methods. If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery. Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporati…
By "independent reviewers", you mean bought youtube influencers, right? Because that's what's often happening in industries where external reviews plays a big role.