[mercer]

I've spent months working on the video players for all the brands for one of the largest media companies in the world.

I did plenty unpleasant work for them, like building a clean redesign, agonizing over page load speeds, and then filling up the page with multi-megabyte tracking tools and every possible ad under sun (which would not only ruin the design, but often inexplicably and randomly break the page because of really, really shitty code).

All that work was pleasant compared to the horror of working on the video player though, and I felt bad for the full-timers who were usually put on 'bug-fixing' duty while we contractors got to work on the cool projects...

[lostlogin]

I always feel like people are brave to admit they do this sort of work, and I have less of this feeling reading about much older professions. However it's very interesting and the stories are often both amusing and horrifying whatever my overriding view.

[mercer]

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying (or implying), but I'm curious. Could you elaborate?

[lostlogin]

I perceive the industry to be a waste of very talented people's time and skill sets. The brains doing this stuff could solve some huge problems yet they are just working on ways of serving up more adverts in more distracting ways. Somewhat in conflict with this view of mine is my interest in the stories that come out of the industry and the clever ways hard problems are solved.

[manigandham]

It takes all kinds of people and jobs to make this world work. There's no such thing as just realigning effort to "solve some huge problems".

Advertising is a massive industry and while it does have some plenty of annoying outputs, it has also powered the commercialization and expansion of the internet to what we have today. The world has definitely benefited from all the rich content, services and companies like Google that are available because of it.

[lostlogin]

> There's no such thing as just realigning effort to "solve some huge problems".

There is, it's just very hard to do and usually requires some potential catastrophe and a lot of money to do. Yes, advertising has funded some great things, but many of them I avoid. I want my data to stay where I put it and don't want to be tracked and sold. Pretty sure I'm losing though.

[mercer]

Hah, I agree. That's why I developed some degree of depression and vowed never to do this kind of thing again. Not that I'm likely to solve some huge problems, but at the very least I don't want to make the world a worse place.

I don't know if your view and interest are in conflict though. Valuable knowledge can come from bad sources, no?

[lostlogin]

Thanks for the reply - I was trying to avoid sounding insulting. There are ethical dilemmas with my job so it would be a little rich to go there. Regarding good data, bad source (adding to Godwin's law), Nazi medical experiments and the more recent use of their data. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

[mercer]

Hehe, that was exactly what I was thinking of, but I wanted to avoid Godwinning. So I Godlost.