[chupy]

Working in adtech was interesting for me because I learned how to work with distributed systems, thought me the importance of optimizing, scaling, instrumentation etc. It's extremely satisfying shaving a ms or two in response times in an app when you have 15 ms in total to respond.

I built for example a data pipeline that ingests Bluekai/Oracle data cloud data and from a big data perspective it's an amazing experience: from dealing with ingesting billions of records per day to making sure you can build audiences based on those records in near real time.

From a privacy perspective it's very scary stuff. When you look at what data Bluekai has, there are hundreds of millions of profiles scattered around hundreds of thousands of segments. Basically you have segments from frozen food shoppers to people that bought a mercedes a class model 2020.

P.S.I can say also the same thing about Google, FB etc. A lot of people that work there are basically working in adtech, especially in Google.

[alkonaut]

So basically you are saying that even if the domain is something between uninteresting and downright "bad", the fact that it has a lot of technically interesting aspects? I guess I can understand that. That's most likely the reality for a lot of us. Not that the domain we work in is inherently questionable, but that it's just mundane (insurance, manufacturing, whatever)

I feel the same way about most defense tech, for example. For example, I'd have nothing against working on missile guidance systems that actually kill people, but I'd never take a job in adtech. So what we count as questionable is just individual.