Engineers irrationally hate advertising tech

If I were looking to work for other people, the primary reason I would likely not work for any of the advertising companies or startups I've looked at is not the engineering challenges they face, nor any irrational hatred of advertising, but the fact that ad companies are run by ad men.

Maybe a better word would be "MBA Types". There is a culture/group/whatever of people who are different from me, who in many ways I have trouble relating to and who seem to make decisions, in my experience, that are bad for engineering and bad for the product, but good for short term business wins.

I'm not saying they are wrong or bad or that I irrationally hate them, just that I long ago added to the list of things I look for in an employer a very senior person (CTO for instance) who is an engineer. And then I look to make sure that engineer is the one who has final say on engineering decisions.

Looking at most add startups "Team" pages, there are no engineers there at all.

Certainly there is a cultural segment of people who really seem to hate the idea of marketing, advertising, SEO, etc.

There's overlap with engineers, but I don't think this perspective is intrinsic to engineers.

To be a really good advertiser, you normally need to do some of the following loathsome things (and others not listed):

1. Outright spam. 2. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content distribution. 3. Collect information on people that normally violates user notions of privacy. 4. Abuse otherwise useful UI features like pop-up windows in order to force ads into user view. 5. Be obnoxious to get your message heard, ie make the ad big, make the colors outlandish, add sound.

Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.

Television, print and radio advertisements have irrevocably caused me to gag at most advertisements. I can see right though the lies and half-truths that marketers spin to fool people into buying their mediocre products. Take any McDonald's ad campaign over the past few years. Note that (at least in Canada) that no overweight person is ever featured. Somehow, perfectly healthy people are devouring Big Macs and we're expected to believe it.

Advertisements now often rely heavily on sexual overtones. Web advertisements are quite guilty as well. As an adult male with a functioning brain, I find ads that rely on sexuality disgusting. I wasn't compelled to purchase alcohol before the commercial came on, and now I'm thoroughly repulsed. Decrement another point of respect for marketers.

I'm also disturbed by ad companies tracking me whenever possible. I read a forum thread on a public computer which described a custom suit company. For the next week, I was inundated with ads for that company on the same computer. I do not seek "personalization" as I never intentionally click on ads. If I want something, I'll go out and look for it. On my own computer, I block as many ad servers as I can through my hosts file.

Yes, the world really does revolve around money. However, advertising is not the sole plausible revenue model for a web site. Wikipedia is a fine example of a web site that doesn't need third-party advertising to exist. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Wikimedia Foundation because it's funded so openly. GitHub seems to be chugging along without bombarding its users with advertisements because it has a premium content model.

As was mentioned earlier, "engineers" are smart enough to see through advertising. Disillusionment of web sites like Facebook and Google Analytics is more than enough to propagate disgust for advertising.

But I especially wouldn't want to work for advertisers. It seems natural that such companies would be structured to have engineering work for sales and marketing, with management acting as a funnel rather than an umbrella.

An engineer wants to build something useful, and advertising is not useful. I mean really, who cares if 1% of a particular demographic switches from Tide to Wisk? Do you really want to put your talents to use in that way?