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

What is the difference between need and want? Economically, there is no difference - there are simply goods that have less elastic demand curves and goods that have more elastic demand curves. The elasticity value that distinguishes "need" from "want" is totally arbitrary.

this guy must be young, as he doesn't seem to remember how fucking awful the internet was before google (google search that is. he seems to take it for granted, as anything invented before i was born.. like running water... or electricity).

  I’m not saying that my code needs to save the world or support 
  humanitarian causes, but it should at least be something that I like, 
  or I would use, or that I care about.

and i am not just talking about how awful search was. remember punch-the-monkey ads? i feel like google adwords is the second greatest internet invention.

so i have to look at a couple of (non-intrusive, often related to my interest) ads, in order to pay for my access to any bit on information from anywhere in the world, in single-digit milliseconds?

and btw, google's self-driving cars? toootally about freeing-up more of your time to be able to watch even more ads -- because today, i don't look at ads (billboards) while i am driving..

(ask me why advertising is the only way to pay for a service like search at a scale like the internet -- with transaction costs and all that)

a) There is a long tradition of advertising supporting other enterprises without corrupting it. Did the Watergate investigation only occur to sell advertising? Few would argue that was the case, but many would argue that revenue from advertising made it possible.

b) Advertising can (and should) get much better than it is. In the ideal form you would never see an ad until the moment you needed what it was selling and at that point the advertised product would be exactly what you needed. Working towards that goal is interesting, and teaches us at least as much about human intelligence as all the research in AI labs over the last 25 years.

If you agree with the OP and want a more meaningful job than you have now, my non-profit is hiring:

http://www.globalgiving.org/aboutus/jobs/

I'm personally a little annoyed with the "the user is not the customer" meme.

I used to work on a product search engine. I had four, count them four distinct groups I had to please with my shopping search engine.

The first group was the user. If the users didn't like our site, find the item they were looking for, and buy it, we didn't make money and I got fired.

The second group were the merchants. The merchants wanted our fire hose of traffic to always be pointed at each of them individually, all the time, always increasing. If the merchants didn't like the traffic we were sending them and ended our relationship, we didn't make money and I got fired.

Also up there was the Googlebot, a customer of its own. If the Googlebot didn't like our site, it wouldn't send any traffic to us, we wouldn't send any traffic to our merchants, we wouldn't make any money and I would get fired.

Finally was the sysadmin. The sysadmin was the only guy who actually had to run the software I wrote. If he wasn't happy with it, our site would go down in the middle of the night, he wouldn't be able to get it back up without waking me up in the middle of the night, and I would feel really bad, and maybe even get fired.

The world isn't black and white. You can serve many masters. Some days what's better for the user takes priority, some days what's better for the sysadmin takes priority. Some days you smack a giant ass banner ad on the top of the site, other days you take down the giant ass banner ad because it's slowing down your site and driving users away and costing you more money than it brings in. There are gradations between the white-gloved consummate servant to the user and packing your users into the chute to get sheared, chopped, battered and fried.

The "users are products" meme is just so goddamn emo-sophomoric-simplistic-annoying. Blarghch.