[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)