[aarongough]

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric...

I have usually been able to find a lot of joy in solving the problems in the smaller areas where I was focused, but whenever I took a step back and looked at what I was helping work towards it felt very meaningless.

I think finding a job today where you feel like the work you do does genuine good for the world is an incredibly rare and difficult thing...

[jerf]

Have you tried... looking for one that isn't?

I've been in the biz for coming up on 25 years and I've never tried to make anyone click on an ad.

It also may help to downgrade "doing genuine good" from "solving the world's biggest problem once and for all" to "helping people get food reliably" or "keeping this industrial process that provides value to thousands of people going" and so on. Sometimes I do lose a bit of track of what I'm doing, but in the end the jobs I've worked still end up helping people do useful things, or protecting people, not making them click on ads.

There's a lot of jobs in programming that don't involve making them click on ads. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, there's going to be a lot of jobs that don't boil down to that.

But you may have to, you know, change jobs.

[UncleOxidant]

I've never had a job convincing people to click ads either in about the same amount of time. But when I look at the salaries being paid by those companies trying to get people to click ads I think I must've made a mistake somewhere. Not that I want to have a job getting people to click ads, but those jobs pay like 2X to 3X the highest salary I've ever made (or more).

[spenczar5]

You haven't made a mistake. Those jobs pay highly because they have to. The phenomenon of soulless, not-great-for-the-world jobs being really highly paid is not a new one, and not at all unique to software - compare a celebrity plastic surgeon versus a doctor who saves lives after disasters, or a corporate attorney at a weapons company versus a pro bono lawyer who works for virtually nothing.

[jerf]

Full disclosure, I'm doing OK (not living in SV helps a lot), but, yeah, I'm not pulling down half-a-mil a year.

But I don't want to hate my job. I don't always love my current job... as I like to say, they're paying us precisely because this isn't what we'd be doing of our own free will... but I don't want to hate it.

Because it's more than just the hating the job. It's coming home every day to your family in a bad mood. It's your children associating you coming home with the guy in the bad mood coming home. It's being on hair trigger all the time despite your best efforts. It's living in a place I don't want to live.

The funny thing is, I look at that and I don't feel like I should be willing to pay $300,000/year for that... but apparently I am.

[Accujack]

It's neither rare or difficult, exactly. The problem is how you look for the job.

Most corporations in the US that are for profit aren't about doing good, they're about making money, and publicly held corporations are even legally encouraged by US law to put the shareholders' bottom line first and foremost.

Non profits can care a lot more, but they generally (at least the ones that exist not) don't focus on something abstract like software, they generally serve an immediate need like affordable housing or surplus food distribution or job training.

Until the business climate in the US changes, about all anyone can do if they want a job where work actually helps people is either work somewhere they get paid enough to use surplus cash to help people or work for a non profit.

I think an idea that hasn't really been tried yet is building a non profit for software... not fitting a non profit base to an existing package, but building a corporation that is made to produce software for the public good.

[burntoutfire]

> I think an idea that hasn't really been tried yet is building a non profit for software... not fitting a non profit base to an existing package, but building a corporation that is made to produce software for the public good.

Mozilla? Unfortunately, they weren't successful at creating new things of value (with maybe Rust being the exception).

[dahfizz]

I'm going to take a wild guess that you are a web developer.

I'm a happy low level systems developer. I solve hard and interesting problems that have nothing to do with ads.

[notacoward]

Who are your customers? There are plenty of low level systems developers at Facebook and Google and so on. The solve the same hard and interesting problems that you do, probably at greater scale so they're even more hard and interesting. Often they're many layers removed from the people who directly get others to click ads. Being a low-level developer, or being at a separate company, doesn't necessarily put you at any greater remove from the advertising octopus.

[dahfizz]

I work in Fintech, our customers are banks and the like. They actually buy our software because it generates value directly instead of trading in human attention.

Maybe you think banks are just as bad as advertisers but I tell myself I am enabling the tens of millions of Americans who have retirement accounts. The day-to-day is enjoyable nonetheless.

[notacoward]

> Maybe you think banks are just as bad as advertisers

Banks as in consumer banks? Maybe not. Commercial banks, brokerages, hedge funds? Welp. I admit that some of those have made my imminent retirement possible, but from a broader view I don't see much good about how large the US financial sector is compared to the overall economy or the preferential treatment they get from our government.

> I tell myself I am enabling the tens of millions of Americans who have retirement accounts.

I'm sure many at Facebook would say they're enabling small businesses and non-profits directly through advertising, and many more "little people" through the platform(s) that those ad dollars pay for. They're also enabling some very unsavory people and behaviors, as are most in fintech. Read the news lately? ;) Everyone likes to dump on ad-funded businesses. I've done so myself. It's not entirely unjustified, but sometimes it seems disproportionate and even hypocritical.

[aarongough]

Correct!

Interesting point you make: there is definitely selection bias going on because of this, but I've honestly never thought about it that way before!

[ci5er]

> Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads.

That's an amazing fact.

May I ask how old you are?

I've been designing SOCs, DSPs, Control Systems and a lot of software for various systems since 1985, and I can only recall one that might have been close to "clicking on ads" (it was a personalized "on hold" system for dial-in to major retailers (like JCP), to replace Muzak with offers and information and stuff). I was the VOIP-to-Enterprise-Telecom integration guy, so not directly tied to the ad-part, but the company pushed couponing to their clients pretty hard.

[gnu]

Same. I am in the industry for 20+ years and thankfully none of my jobs have involved anything close to ads.

[aarongough]

I'm 35. Luckily I'm now running my own manufacturing business where I get to work on a much wider range of stuff!

[orbifold]

The quote should be

"The best minds that I know are thinking about how to make people click ads."

There is a considerable number of exceedingly intelligent people in pure mathematics and (theoretical) physics that don't work for Google, Facebook etc. and never would. Those that do often have nothing to do with Ads even three to four edges removed (think Martinis or the people at MSR).

[ska]

This is true, but don't overestimate it. I know first rate math & physics types who gave up on academic work and now work at a FAANG or similar; and I know second rate ones who stayed. So it's a mixed bag.

[treis]

>Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

They're not really though. Ads may be the revenue stream but it's not like the top engineers at Google were on ads. They were building the search engine.

[adventured]

It's an amusing quote in the sense that it gets used by two people on opposite sides of it, and they're both wrong.

People that hate ads love that quote because they like using it to lambast the tech industry (in general, and advertising in particular), even though only a small percentage of engineers or other tech industry employees work on ads.

People in the ad space love that premise. You know what's worse than that premise? Admitting to themselves that they're not the best minds of their generation and they're still stuck doing work trying to figure out how to optimize ad clicking - the worst combination. At least they get to pretend they're the best minds of their generation, if they buy into the quote, that's a consolation prize.

The best minds are largely not working in advertising (maybe a small share of them are). They're figuring out how to leverage CRISPR to cure and prevent disease, or trying to figure out a therapy for Alzheimer's disease, or working on immunotherapy. They're the kind of minds that were working at Pharmasset figuring out how to save tens of millions of lives by curing hepatitis C. They're designing and building the next generation of semiconductors at ARM, Apple, TSMC, Samsung or Nvidia, pushing against the boundaries of what's physically possible. They're working on electric cars at Tesla or VW. They're trying to solve our battery problems. They're launching rockets at SpaceX or Rocket Lab. They're designing the next airplanes for Airbus. They're at NASA, ESA, JAXA, CNSA, heading to the Moon and Mars, or working on James Webb, figuring out if Venus contains life, and so on. They're designing the next generation of nuclear reactors, ITER or maybe working at LHC. They're working at Illumina, Boston Dynamics, Intuitive Surgical. They're in national and university labs all over the world, trying to solve very hard problems on a daily basis. They're even working on hypersonic weapons, military drones and designing nukes. And that's not meant to exclude the rest of this giant world, as the world is filled with examples.

[crawlcrawler]

>> were

If you meant to say that Google's top engineers _used to_ work on the search engine but nowadays they work on making people click on ads because that's were the money is, then I wholeheartedly agree with you

[treis]

No, it's like saying the best athletes of our generation use their gifts to get people to buy stuff. That's how they make their money, but ultimately it's not what they spend their gifts doing. They work to be at the top of their sport and other people figure out how to make money on that.

[crawlcrawler]

Successful/rock star athletes spend 99.9% of their time honing their athletic skills and the rest on advertising deals. Google on the other hand spend 99.9% of its time on making people click on ads. Because that's their athletic skill? No. Because money.

[jpxw]

The search engine built to make people click on ads (/tongue-in-cheek)

[Diederich]

> Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads.

This is interesting, thanks for sharing that.

Of the nine organizations that have paid me to write software since 1993, only one of them would fit in your criteria.

Note: I am in no way doubting your claim, and I actually appreciate your perspective and the quote you cited.

I will more deeply consider that when categorizing companies in my mind going forward.

[aarongough]

I have been lucky enough to work with a lot of great people, and I definitely found a lot of enjoyment in a lot of the work I've done, but I definitely wish that time had been spent doing work with more of a positive impact... Luckily there's still lots of time and I'm working on more impactful stuff now!

[notacoward]

I sort-of know Jeff, and I think he comes here sometimes, so: hi! Funny thing: the same company "inspired" both of us. The best minds of my generation are figuring out how to get two broken systems to talk to one another.

[throwaways885]

Ads are only the way of making money, or are you saying it only matters what the end result is? It's possible to sell ads and also do good with the work.

[crawlcrawler]

Businesses have a tendency to optimize for making money so if the only way for them to do so is by having people click on ads, guess what they'll eventually become great at.