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Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

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Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#51

Post by clobber »

cletus wrote: post #40

It's strange to have some moral objection to advertising because advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it. Ad revenue on the Internet, almost by definition, means someone found something they wanted. How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need? The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive,…

PPC ads in Google SERPs are a great thing because they're keyword-based, highly relevant and targeted.

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.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#52

Post by hugh3 »

dstein wrote: post #48
erikpukinskis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers lead meaningful careers. 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 custo…

You've misconstrued "improving someone's life" to being "meaningful work". Maybe a banker thinks his career is meaningful, but bankers do not improve people's lives. The people who built the house you're buying are the ones who improve your life. The banker is an unnecessary middleman. Middlemen in almost every scenario are redundant and merely add drag to our society. If we could eliminate the bankers job, automate…

What rot. The banker is a middleman, it's true, but a very necessary one. The bank connects people who have money (old people) to people who want to borrow money (young people), allowing house-sized quantities of money to be borrowed and paid back over a period of decades in a way that lowers risk and maximises accessibility for the depositors. If it weren't for banks, then most young people would be (essentially) unable to afford to buy houses.

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.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#53

Post by Lewisham »

_ut0p wrote: post #50
Lewisham wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. 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 fro…

Google's mission statement is: "Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- Yeah. Show me one company which doesn't have a mission statement like helping people, curing diseases, feeding the hungry...

Well, here's one for Exxon Mobil (first I chose)

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.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#54

Post by a3_nm »

cletus wrote: post #40

It's strange to have some moral objection to advertising because advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it. Ad revenue on the Internet, almost by definition, means someone found something they wanted. How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need? The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive,…

> How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?

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.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#55

Post by ckuehne »

veyron wrote: post #37
jamesteow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many people who say this are the same people who'd pay for every one of the free services offered by these companies. I for one would rather have ads.

Ads seem harmless until they start using your likeness to sell stuff to others or vice versa.

Why exactly is this harmful, i.e., who is harmed and by how much?

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#57

Post by jsnell »

tpatke wrote: post #27
aristus wrote: post #8

I happen to work for Facebook, and a large fraction of my friends and family are expatriates. A place to easily keep in touch, share photos of kids, chat with abuelita, all that boring stuff, directly improves our quality of life. 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…

I was going to comment that Google, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for search, connections and communicating respectively. Ads are simply a revenue model. If Facebook charged $20 per month, would you work for them then? 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…

> Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.

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.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#59

Post by mooneater »

Imo its worth working at any big shop for a year to see how things work at scale, and understand the problems bigger companies face. Consider it part of your training.

Dont hand over a significant chunk of your productive career. Just use them to sharpen your own saw.

Re: Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

#60

Post by veyron »

ckuehne wrote: post #55
veyron wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads seem harmless until they start using your likeness to sell stuff to others or vice versa.

Why exactly is this harmful, i.e., who is harmed and by how much?

When my likeness is used in conjunction with a random product, there is an implicit assumption that I somehow support it. And other people may see it and distance themselves from me, refuse to do business, or refuse to hire me.

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.

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