[throwaway582]

That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel political. Throughout my team and the other teams we work closely with, I find my co-workers and superiors to be thoughtful, smart, open-minded, and really nice to work with.

[whatevah5982]

Some years ago I was unsatisfied with my pay and I accepted the interview of a Giant Search corp, getting to the on-site interview. The lunch with random employees was perhaps the best part of the experience for me, as it became abundantly clear that a good chunk of devs that I had some conversation with outlined in very generic terms the same basic stuff everybody else needs to do in software: maintenance, basic infrastructure, scripts, and so on. Which is, you know, totally expected.

I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.

This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.

The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.

I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.

[pansa2]

> I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising [...] on interesting problems

Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?

[busterarm]

Having worked on the spend side of things and at high stakes (9 figure budgets), targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating. More than anything else I've done in my career, even. This is especially true when you have constraints, like being in a regulated industry such as legal marketing.

The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.

[blub]

"targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating"

I thought the answer to that was a rather bland "by gobbling up even more information about everyone"?

[busterarm]

Not all data points are useful. Different pools have different profitability advertised in different ways.

Some highly useful data is hard to get directly or requires significant and/or stealthy spend.

[arez]

[flagged]

[busterarm]

I thought that I made it clear that I don't work on this anymore.

Advertising isn't an inherent evil. You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise.

I advertised for one specific company. I worked in an industry that was pretty grey. Some parts of the business were vaguely predatory and others served a great public social need. More importantly, you had to have an actual reason to fill out our forms and follow through with us. We weren't just desperately trying to get any eyeballs. The work that I did very much did help people.

Also you're not going to get much mileage shaming people for what they do for a living. You being reductive doesn't really reflect reality either. I was much more than some marketer and yes, the problems were extremely intellectually stimulating, otherwise I wouldn't have been there.

That's better than I can say for most of the quants I worked with -- they were almost all just in it for the money.

[throwaway582]

I work on infrastructure. Security, privacy, speed, reliability—all of these are complex challenges, especially at our scale.

And it's a reasonable question. Thanks for asking.

[Ygg2]

The only interesting problem in advertising - How to part people from their money :P