17 ms·

The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do

479 points by dwaxe 10y ago

tonyarkles 10y ago
Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  You could be working on the auction side (where ads bid to be served to that particular user profile), or a bunch of other infrastructure stuff.
- nharada 10y ago
  and how do you work fulltime for a company and not bother to figure out what they do?
  - dspillett 10y ago
    I have a colleague you might like to meet. Understanding anything is not his forté. He turns up, does what he is told, goes home, and is paid at then end of the month. Except maybe the "does what he is told" part, but that is a completely different rant.
- randlet 10y ago
  I find it difficult to understand how you would even interview & accept a job without understanding what the company did.
  - chii 10y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair
    - 8912889219 10y ago
      I really think this quote is a bit unfair here. Especially in the startup scene, many companies have quite vague product descriptions. I've worked at a place where it took me 3 months to figure out what they were doing (nothing immoral BTW, just very complex/diverse products).
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        But for those three months you had no idea whether what they were doing was moral or not, and you didn't check.
  - BradyDale 10y ago
    I got the impression it's just super fun. We're doing ad syndication! We sell space on websites! We have an innovative peer disruption space sorting alorithm optimizer!
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Once you learn that they are selling ads on websites, "what does the company do to earn money" seems to be sufficiently answered. Also I would strongly suspect that most traders of stolen goods (ad spots, in this case) would have a path for legitimately acquired merchandise as well, not only for plausible deniability but also because they sure would not mind paying their bills in a clean way, they just failed to resist the lure of the extra cash. With that in place, you'd have to actually work in the shady part to know about it, or have bird's eye numbers of the whole company where you might see that output does not match the legitimate input.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    A nice tech jobs in a cushy air-conditioned office that lets you feed your family: Jobs like these don't grow on trees.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Because he was not. Maybe he was working on a backend, or on a UI, or on testing, or on automation, or sysdmin, or 100 of other places.
- blowski 10y ago
  Microservices! I went for an interview at a startup, where the very charismatic CEO explained how their wonderful product helped website owners optimise their content based on their user's profiles. He forgot to mention that those profiles were built using all sorts of illegal and TOS-breaking practices to build display ads for gambling sites. I only found this out by accident, months after the (failed) interview, when talking about them with somebody at a meetup. So I guess it's possible if the business has a specific strategy for doing it.
- gruez 10y ago
  Because you would only realize if you were actually writing the extensions, which only takes one or two person to do because all they do is inject a javascript file into each page.
- jkraker 10y ago
  Good question. If they actually figured out a strategy to do this, it seems to me that it would be a maddening job. Oh look! A free lunch!
- nilkn 10y ago
  I got the impression he wasn't working directly on the ad injection software at all. He was working either on different software or in a different division of the company. It sounds like 5oonRed has a culture of not talking about the ad injection and that their internal jargon was designed to disguise it. He wasn't shocked to find that he personally had been writing an ad injector. He was shocked to find that the company he was working for made such software without his realizing it and that it derived most of its revenue from said software.
  - ieatfood 10y ago
    >5oonRed It's 50onRed, apparently. The article uses a font with Text Figures which makes '0's look like 'o's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures
- rememberlenny 10y ago
  When I first moved to New York, I worked at a company that was an Ad Injection toolbar. I had no idea what the company did for six months. They hired me to make them a website. I worked alongside an art director and a content creator. Everyday, the reoccurring question was, "what exactly do we do". I was disconnected from the sales staff and the marketing side, so I kept working on a basic WordPress site. Six months in, we heard that the office was going to close. There was little to no warning, then a week later, we heard that the FCC raided the Florida home office for the CEO breaking tons of spam laws. The overall structure of the company wasn't necessarily designed to keep people unaware of what they were doing. Instead, they had so many things that the company did, but most of the other "things" didnt make any money. When you boiled down the operations, you realized there was a small number of things that was hugely profitable (spam/toolbars), then a ton of other things that were nonsense and unprofitable.
  - ffumarola 10y ago
    Sounds like Adknowledge?
- DougN7 10y ago
  These guys are _very_ good at selling, in other words, making something seem good and pure and beautiful. I ended up in an almost identical company doing identical tech. At first we were building an anti-spam platform for which the user would only see two ads a day from us, and none from anyone else. Seemed like a good trade off. Except we never got to the anti-spam bit -- just the ad bit. I was gone within 3 months of arriving. It might have just been that particular company at that time, but I've never worked with so many morally questionable people at one company. Never again.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." - Jean Renoir Right out of school I worked at a company that builds deep packet inspection hardware and it seems like a dream job: good pay, smart people, interesting problems, reasonable schedule. Too bad about the product though.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I don't really see a problem with working on something like that. There's a legitimate use for technologies like that. The problems are laws and social structures that allow those technologies to be abused. I don't fault the engineer who makes a better gun, but I might fault the marketing department that sells it in a market knowing it will be used for harm (don't be a war profiteer), or the the politicians that resist sane restrictions .
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  I got the impression that the employees in the article were making ads. When you make ads you don't necessarily notice how exactly those ads get in front of users. When they say that the didn't know how the company made money, they probably meant that they thought it worked like other ad companies: paying websites for ad spots.
- nkohari 10y ago
  Adtech in general is kind of difficult to grok at first. It's dense with jargon and is largely driven by partnerships and resale. To a newcomer the industry can be very opaque. It's likely they weren't working on the actual ad injection itself, but rather the backend systems that select and count the ads. From that perspective it's just a matter of handling X requests per second, without it necessarily being clear where the traffic comes from. When I worked at Adzerk, we'd be approached occasionally by companies doing this kind of garbage. They were always very good at disguising their actual traffic sources. Our sales team had to be very adept at asking the right questions to eliminate the shitty partners quickly.
- 55555 10y ago
  It's pretty easy to compartmentalize your staff. In fact, it's necessary, as it allows people to not feel "responsible" even when aware that they are doing something wrong. So one person makes the sales calls, and another ships the products, and another makes the products, and another does the billing, and they're all just executing SOPs and minding their own business...
dec0dedab0de 10y ago
I went to a meetup that they hosted once, and it was pretty obvious that they were up to something, but they did have a really cool office.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I visited Limewire's offices, once. Three story office in Tribeca, with giant kitchens that were bigger than my apartment, game rooms, the works. It seems to me that the more ambiguous your business strategy is, the more you have to show off to convince others that it isn't.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - draw_down 10y ago
    I think it's more like, if you have a cool office with nice kitchens you can pay your employees crap and they still think they're getting a great deal.
donretag 10y ago
I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing coughpyramidschemecough company similar to Herbalife. They purchased us for our technology to power their platform. There was supposed to be very little overlap with their business, so I did not feel too worried about it. As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked, and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned down requests to work remotely. None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.
- tswartz 10y ago
  Now I'm curious... How did they sell the change in focus to your team/company? What aspects about MLM did you find most surprising?
  - donretag 10y ago
    There was no change in focus per se. The company was an e-commerce site, and the parent company was going to simply be another vendor. They were using our in-house technology to power their external (to us) e-commerce presence, besides the placement of their products on our site. However, their products started to receive more and more focus on our site. If their highly profitable products had competitors in certain categories, we would eliminate those other products. SEO was optimized for those products. The underlying tech focus did not change. The UI team continued working on UIs, mobile teams on the app, etc. MLM was/is designed to fail. The barriers of entry for any form of compensation were incredibly high. If you satisfied some requirement of the program, there would be another one that was not achieved, invalidating any profits. I had zero insights on the parent company's network, but I simply do not see how a new person could make any money at all. Although our location, at least those in tech, had nothing to do with the MLM program, except for putting the products on the site (through the standard vendor process), it was still uneasy to be part of. I was not starving. I had a choice to not be part of it, so I exercised that choice. I should add the MLMs are completely legal under strict federal guidelines. Nothing illegal was happening, it was a bit too immoral for my personal standards.
al_chemist 10y ago
It's good to hear that all the C[ETF]Os of adware business found their employment at Facebook/Google/Amazon.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Yeah, this jumped out at me too. I'm not very reassured about such morally dubious characters working for companies that control most of our digital lives.
notacoward 10y ago
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point. My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.
- danenania 10y ago
  You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
  - mk89 10y ago
    indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      Possibly. However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.
      - jrowley 10y ago
zekevermillion 10y ago
There are many businesses that are built around exploiting vulnerable customers or users, and it is common for such businesses to have contrived complicated ethical justifications for their conduct. I'm thinking in particular of law and finance.
dharma1 10y ago
I had no idea there is a such a large industry doing this type of stuff until building a Windows 10 machine recently for VR. So many "free", seemingly kosher apps seem to install sneaky adware in the main app installation process these days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-unicorn-ironsource-raises-105-million-ahead-of-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-un...
TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
> “Like, man, this is a really nice office,” he recalls thinking. “Open floor plan...” So "Tyler" wasn't a programmer, then. Got it.
- tomp 10y ago
  Not everybody dislikes an open floor plan.
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    You're right of cause, but strangely enough I never meet anyone who liked open floor plans that didn't have a pair of head phones glued to their head half the day. It's personal preference of cause, but I believe that the disadvantages starts to cancel out any benefits at around 6-8 people per office.
- mfringel 10y ago
  He also didn't like octagonal windows, and definitely used a spatula when making omelettes.
- recursive 10y ago
  Programmers don't have to dislike open floor plans. I know this because I am one.
  - suprfsat 10y ago
    I sexually identify as an open floor plan.
- puranjay 10y ago
  Any kind of task that requires long periods of concentration is unfit for an open floor plan. I'm a writer and man, I hate writing with people around me
pdkl95 10y ago
> you’d see ads on sites like Wikipedia or Target.com Normally we call that vandalism. They should be facing criminal charges, not civil lawsuits and pressure from Google.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  There's no case afaik, because they disclose everything in the original agreement when you install their software. Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like for cigarettes)?
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    > there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. True, iff the customer was adequately informed about the offer in a way most people will understand. Contracts are not supposed to be a "gotcha" with extra terms buried in the fine print. If the installer only featured the "bait" and mentioned the adware behind a dark pattern UI or deep in the text of the contract, a judge could (and should) void that part of the contract. > Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent At a minimum. That said, the issue isn't really with the person that installs the software. There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      >a judge could (and should) void that part of the contract. There's a difference between voiding a contract that no longer obligates people, and voiding a contract to make actions taken under it illegal. I'm not sure there's good precedent for the latter. >There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia. They're not touching Wikipedia, they're running on the user's computer and manipulating their local served page of Wikipedia. I don't see why anyone else would have a case.
      - spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
univalent 10y ago
This is like the Mickey Mouse version of the 'The Firm'.
yardie 10y ago
I worked at a company very briefly in the early aughts. I thought I was hired to be on the team that built the platform. But before we would do that we needed to have a list of beta users. So my job was writing bots that scoured forums and other social networks for contact information (emails, phone numbers, names, etc.) It took me a week to realize what I was actually doing then another week to plan and execute my escape. The rest of the team were east european and did not give a fuck about what they were doing, it was good money to them. They eventually did release a product with a few thousand users. Not long after, Facebook changed their signup strategy from schools to the general public and the rest is history.
BradyDale 10y ago
Worth noting that the reporter on this story is a beat reporter who has been covering the Philadelphia tech scene closely for years now. She knows it like no one else.
- kmano8 10y ago
  Agreed- Juliana is top-shelf.
vas123 10y ago
Sometimes this adware crap hijacks legitimate open source projects as well and installs on unsuspecting users like this guy: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825 https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825
anandjoseph 10y ago
I met a guy at an open house. He said, "we are like ebay, but a lot cooler". He was wearing a silkroad t-shirt.
jobigoud 10y ago
I also always wonder how the people working on engineering land mines do.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  I once had a conversation with someone who had worked on surface-to-surface missile guidance. He did it because he didn't make the connection between the circuits and the software in front of him and the deaths they caused. Then there was a war and he saw the missiles on the news with pictures of casualties, and suddenly it was "Holy fuck - this stuff actually kills people!" Some people think small picture, and he just couldn't get from the work on his desk to dead bodies without the help of front-line footage. Of course there are also people who are just fine with that kind of work. I don't understand that ethical space at all - but from what I've seen they simply don't understand why anyone would have a problem with what they do.
  - spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
    You have to decide when you work for miltech or any dual use tech company if you are cool with it. At my first job (hydrodynamics R&D)I was tasked with analyzing high sped files from one of our test rigs. It was quite obvious what the rig was simulating and my office mates said oh yes thats REDACTED the Update to REDATED - I had to sit down and think how I felt about this. I do draw the line a at Chem, Bio and Payday Loans.
  - burfog 10y ago
    Yeah, understanding the other side is difficult. I'll try to explain the other side, but it probably won't make sense to you. (as your side makes no sense to me) The trouble is that people can have fundamentally different value systems, priorities, and fears. Maybe the best way to explain it is to say how you appear to the other side. I'm sure you will disagree, which is kind of the point. You look kind of naïve and childish. You appear to believe in some utopian fantasy where all people are good and have or can be converted to a value system that is like your own, with the possible exception of conservatives. You fail to make any effort to protect your nation and culture from being overrun by the brutish, violent, and lazy. You somehow imagine that people from places like Syria and Mexico make better neighbors than many of the conservative people in your own country. Basically, your views fail at self-preservation. You are in denial of the historic fact that every nation is built upon a hill of skulls, and the fact that this is the natural way of nature. You imagine that you can refuse to pile up skulls without becoming part of the pile. If your world were real, I'd rather live in it. I'm not going to deny reality just because I don't like it. Conflict is eternal. I prefer that my people win. It's actually unethical to avoid the conflict. You're ceding ground to the enemy. You let down your descendants, friends, and neighbors. They will be impovershed, killed, and -- as we've seen with ISIS -- enslaved. This shit really happens. It may take decades or even centuries, but every bit of inaction and appeasement brings that day closer. For some reason, you push risk and long-term bad consequences out of your mind. It's like you can't see them. You focus on the positive only, kind of like a gambler. Your optimism probably makes you a happier person. :-)
eastbayjake 10y ago
Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack
- jmcgough 10y ago
  It sounds like they danced around the question when asked directly by someone not in the company.
- hrktb 10y ago
  More generally, not knowing how a company makes money should be a huge problem for someone candidating. Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.
seibelj 10y ago
Interviewed at a company called Rakuten Loyalty in Boston a few years ago. At that time it was the exact same thing, a malware / adware browser toolbar company, and they also sold white label toolbars. Took me the entire interview to figure out what they actually did. Their website [0] now has very little information about what they actually do, with a generic contact form. But an archive.org [1] of their old website shows the truth. Funny how they hide what they actually do now. [0] http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloyalty.com/solutions https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloy...
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  I guess I'm not entirely shocked since Rakuten the parent company and Japanese ecommerce site has very questionable tactics like emails you can't opt out of and forcing new employees to sign up a large number of friends/relatives to the Rakuten credit card.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    Huh? How exactly did the "force" you to get others to sign up for a CC? I also have no problem opting out of Rakuten emails.
    - hkmurakami 10y ago
      New employees at HQ have quotas.
- cjbprime 10y ago
  Hah, wow. I went to JS meetups at their office without realizing that.
  - ErikAugust 10y ago
    AngularJS meetup? Yeah, that office was posh!
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I worked at a web development studio. One of our clients was MannaTech, basically a marketing company that sold snake-oil to parents of sick children, claiming it could "cure" everything from cancer to down syndrome. They were under investigation by the Texas DA at one point. We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually does cure cancer in children, but it still irks me to this day.
- usefulcat 10y ago
  You know it's bad when Texas is willing to investigate. Source: am a long time resident of TX; it's business-friendly reputation is well earned, IMO.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Looked this up, and it's not only selling snake-oil to parents of sick children, it's MLM selling snake oil to parents of sick children. I honestly didn't think such a level of depravity was possible. Oh, and they had Ben Carson for a spokesman for a while. Amazing.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Yeah. My new policy is that if an employer wants to have any sort of business dealings with MannaRelief or MannaTech, it's them or me - I'll walk away.
pnathan 10y ago
whenever I am looking at a company, I google it, I scrape Glassdoor, I look for news articles about it. "How do you make money" is usually on the menu of "things I specifically care about". I'd advise others do do the same. Learn well what the company you're talking to does to earn a buck and who they are beholden to. I avoid adtech, myself.
coldcode 10y ago
I interviewed three times at a company once which didn't seem to have a clear business model. Only in the last interview with the CEO did I realize he was running a ponzi scheme.
aresant 10y ago
So what else is new. If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today. Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1). Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2) Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3) 50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company. (1) http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percent-of-facebooks-revenues-in-q1/ http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percen... (2) http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-in-the-affiliate-industry/ http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-... & http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in-affiliate-marketing-is-starting-to-sound-a-lot-like-me/ http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in... & http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a... (3) https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-generated-online-ads-prescription-drug-sales-canadian-online https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g... & https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  > Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? This was cited in the FB S1 filing, which was around March 2012, so you are correct.
- smt88 10y ago
  One major difference is that Facebook and Google also provide value to their users. They do good and bad things. The company in the article did only bad things.
socrates1998 10y ago
Working at this type of company will eat at your soul. Really, you only have about 40 years of work in you. It sounds like a lot, but when you consider is takes a few years (sometimes more) to figure out what you like. A few more to get good at it. And then you have maybe 20 peak years of productivity, you sure as hell don't want to spend any of it at something you can't respect. When you are done with your career at 60 or 65, you want to be able to look back and say "I did this" or "I created that" or "I helped this many people", not "I worked at that shitty adware company for 2 years because they have me free food and beer"
switz 10y ago
I interviewed at 50onRed a few years ago soon after I left college. I went through the interview process, received an offer, and was on the verge of accepting. It was at this point I realized that I barely understood what the company actually did. I set up another in-person interview, except this time with the roles reversed. I asked them to walk me through their products and platforms so I could better understand what I would be working on. Ten minutes in, I realized what I was looking at. I treaded water until the end of the interview and called them a few days later to decline the offer. The [engineering] team was solid, the tech was intriguing (a lot of expressjs microservices and interesting design patterns), and the offices were great. But given the wealth of compelling opportunities for javascript engineers, I couldn't come up with a good reason to work on something so insipid and manipulative. This article is strangely validating, perhaps in a schadenfreude kind of way.
- spyspy 10y ago
  I interviewed for a co-op position there and was turned down. I guess they saved me some time.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    What's a co-op position?
    - natdempk 10y ago
      Generally it's an extended internship as a supplemental part of a university curriculum.
      - xzel 10y ago
        Exactly. To further hypothesize, Drexel, a Philadelphia university, offers mostly 5 year degrees with co-ops which more often than not involve local Philadelphia companies.
        10y ago
settsu 10y ago
I worked in the user experience team at that one big American domain company (that's well known for mostly the wrong reasons.) Similar situation as the story: great coworkers, great pay, & great perks. One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links. Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was: make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that. Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the monetizing product first, of course.) And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2 offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime. Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...) I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no, it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies) and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by framing your product or service in a particular way.
TheAdamist 10y ago
I've been to a Python Meetup there previously, nice office, nice tech talks. Their sponsor overview certainly didn't disclose what they actually did. Makes me wonder about the other ad platforms in town.
Spooky23 10y ago
How do you not ask what the company does before joining as an FTE? Even discounting moral hazards... wouldn't you want to know what the mission is? Especially at a startup-y type of place?
lossolo 10y ago
Today my mother got AD on her phone with "Android update", it was a pop-up from one of normal sites she visit. So she touched "update now" as she normally do with system messages about update... Then she confirmed, then she got 2 SMS, in one that deal was finalized. WTF? I've checked with Orange and indeed she was charged and subscription was started, 20 euro a month for some 3 shitty sms per week. They have turned this subscription off. THIS practices should be stopped. This is really a plague, I see those on my desktop and phone on regular basis, i know they are fake updates but most people don't..
- quikoa 10y ago
  My mother had this as well but with a game. We simply reversed the charge and continued pay the subscription like normal. They made one vague attempt to get that extra money then gave up. While I'm not a lawyer I doubt such charges would stand up on court.
  - 55555 10y ago
    Often the billing is directly on the phone bill which means the traditional chargeback system won't really help you (it's not a credit card charge and you probably don't want to try to chargeback your phone company). One interesting thing many people don't know is that telcos, almost always oligopolists, are themselves pocketing 30-50% of those fraudulent charges (as they are the payment processor and their rates are extremely high), which helps explain their ambivalence to these sorts of scams.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  I've seen an ad for GTA5 for iOS and Android (obvious scam) on Facebook, and thousands of people liking, and hundreds of comments, most seemed organic, of people tagging their friends. Copyright infringement + scam, right there on Facebook.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  its trivial and free to block all the subscription sms 'services' aka scams in Poland, and probably the rest of EU.
askyourmother 10y ago
I remember interviewing for a search company, but then found most of the work and business was spent on adverts! No thanks Google!
alaskanloops 10y ago
Odd that there aren't any visitor posts on their facebook page..
arcticbull 10y ago
I'd always wondered how all those Bond villains got their henchmen to work on crazy remote islands. I guess the perks were good! Just don't ask what we do ^_^
stordoff 10y ago
Mildly off-topic, but why do sites like this highlight the "top highlight"? I always find it really off-putting (in a "Oh, you tracking EVERYTHING I do" sort of way")
- alanh 10y ago
  "sites like this" = Medium.com sub-brands. I don’t know why Medium chooses to do that. I dislike it, too.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  "Nice reading interest you have there. I'd hate to see anything happen to it." </godfather>
mrweasel 10y ago
>Gill tells me he doesn’t consider himself in the adware business. He prefers, instead, to describe 50onRed as a company that keeps content free for users. I love that bit. How does injecting ads into random sites help keep content free for users? Who's buying those ads by the way? Sure it sound like a terrible company, but I can help thinking that their customers are worse.
- etjossem 10y ago
  If anything, hijacking page real estate makes it less likely the user will click on non-injected ads (which actually pay something out to the content creator). I believe content creators have a right to seek compensation for their work - whether it's through ads, affiliate links, or a subscription model. But what 50onRed does is thievery from the creators, plain and simple.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zem 10y ago
i'm surprised the article never explicitly spelt out the main point - for most people, accepting a job offer is a major sunk cost, so it's a lot harder to quit a job even after a few months than it is to reject an offer from the outset. i'm pretty sure 50onred were counting on that.
daheza 10y ago
My friend works at Spokeo. If you don't know about them they are basically a people search engine. He keeps asking me to work there, but I just cant get over the moral implications of scrapping peoples lives and putting it up for viewing for a price. Something about the product just scratches me wrong so I haven't applied. It is really too bad as their tech seems solid and the offices are amazing.
gaius 10y ago
advertisers feel duped when they pay top dollar for what they believe to be “genuine, legitimate, honest ads Yeah right. No clean hands in that game.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
There was an interesting defcon talk a few years back from someone who was a malware developer about his experiences working at a job developing malware. https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I

479 points by dwaxe 10y ago

Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!

Aelinsaar 10y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
tehwalrus 10y ago
You could be working on the auction side (where ads bid to be served to that particular user profile), or a bunch of other infrastructure stuff.
nharada 10y ago
and how do you work fulltime for a company and not bother to figure out what they do?
- dspillett 10y ago
  I have a colleague you might like to meet. Understanding anything is not his forté. He turns up, does what he is told, goes home, and is paid at then end of the month. Except maybe the "does what he is told" part, but that is a completely different rant.
randlet 10y ago
I find it difficult to understand how you would even interview & accept a job without understanding what the company did.
- chii 10y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair
  - 8912889219 10y ago
    I really think this quote is a bit unfair here. Especially in the startup scene, many companies have quite vague product descriptions. I've worked at a place where it took me 3 months to figure out what they were doing (nothing immoral BTW, just very complex/diverse products).
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      But for those three months you had no idea whether what they were doing was moral or not, and you didn't check.
- BradyDale 10y ago
  I got the impression it's just super fun. We're doing ad syndication! We sell space on websites! We have an innovative peer disruption space sorting alorithm optimizer!
- usrusr 10y ago
  Once you learn that they are selling ads on websites, "what does the company do to earn money" seems to be sufficiently answered. Also I would strongly suspect that most traders of stolen goods (ad spots, in this case) would have a path for legitimately acquired merchandise as well, not only for plausible deniability but also because they sure would not mind paying their bills in a clean way, they just failed to resist the lure of the extra cash. With that in place, you'd have to actually work in the shady part to know about it, or have bird's eye numbers of the whole company where you might see that output does not match the legitimate input.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  A nice tech jobs in a cushy air-conditioned office that lets you feed your family: Jobs like these don't grow on trees.
sametmax 10y ago
Because he was not. Maybe he was working on a backend, or on a UI, or on testing, or on automation, or sysdmin, or 100 of other places.
blowski 10y ago
Microservices! I went for an interview at a startup, where the very charismatic CEO explained how their wonderful product helped website owners optimise their content based on their user's profiles. He forgot to mention that those profiles were built using all sorts of illegal and TOS-breaking practices to build display ads for gambling sites. I only found this out by accident, months after the (failed) interview, when talking about them with somebody at a meetup. So I guess it's possible if the business has a specific strategy for doing it.
gruez 10y ago
Because you would only realize if you were actually writing the extensions, which only takes one or two person to do because all they do is inject a javascript file into each page.
jkraker 10y ago
Good question. If they actually figured out a strategy to do this, it seems to me that it would be a maddening job. Oh look! A free lunch!
nilkn 10y ago
I got the impression he wasn't working directly on the ad injection software at all. He was working either on different software or in a different division of the company. It sounds like 5oonRed has a culture of not talking about the ad injection and that their internal jargon was designed to disguise it. He wasn't shocked to find that he personally had been writing an ad injector. He was shocked to find that the company he was working for made such software without his realizing it and that it derived most of its revenue from said software.
- ieatfood 10y ago
  >5oonRed It's 50onRed, apparently. The article uses a font with Text Figures which makes '0's look like 'o's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures
rememberlenny 10y ago
When I first moved to New York, I worked at a company that was an Ad Injection toolbar. I had no idea what the company did for six months. They hired me to make them a website. I worked alongside an art director and a content creator. Everyday, the reoccurring question was, "what exactly do we do". I was disconnected from the sales staff and the marketing side, so I kept working on a basic WordPress site. Six months in, we heard that the office was going to close. There was little to no warning, then a week later, we heard that the FCC raided the Florida home office for the CEO breaking tons of spam laws. The overall structure of the company wasn't necessarily designed to keep people unaware of what they were doing. Instead, they had so many things that the company did, but most of the other "things" didnt make any money. When you boiled down the operations, you realized there was a small number of things that was hugely profitable (spam/toolbars), then a ton of other things that were nonsense and unprofitable.
- ffumarola 10y ago
  Sounds like Adknowledge?
DougN7 10y ago
These guys are _very_ good at selling, in other words, making something seem good and pure and beautiful. I ended up in an almost identical company doing identical tech. At first we were building an anti-spam platform for which the user would only see two ads a day from us, and none from anyone else. Seemed like a good trade off. Except we never got to the anti-spam bit -- just the ad bit. I was gone within 3 months of arriving. It might have just been that particular company at that time, but I've never worked with so many morally questionable people at one company. Never again.
AlexandrB 10y ago
"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." - Jean Renoir Right out of school I worked at a company that builds deep packet inspection hardware and it seems like a dream job: good pay, smart people, interesting problems, reasonable schedule. Too bad about the product though.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I don't really see a problem with working on something like that. There's a legitimate use for technologies like that. The problems are laws and social structures that allow those technologies to be abused. I don't fault the engineer who makes a better gun, but I might fault the marketing department that sells it in a market knowing it will be used for harm (don't be a war profiteer), or the the politicians that resist sane restrictions .
TorKlingberg 10y ago
I got the impression that the employees in the article were making ads. When you make ads you don't necessarily notice how exactly those ads get in front of users. When they say that the didn't know how the company made money, they probably meant that they thought it worked like other ad companies: paying websites for ad spots.
nkohari 10y ago
Adtech in general is kind of difficult to grok at first. It's dense with jargon and is largely driven by partnerships and resale. To a newcomer the industry can be very opaque. It's likely they weren't working on the actual ad injection itself, but rather the backend systems that select and count the ads. From that perspective it's just a matter of handling X requests per second, without it necessarily being clear where the traffic comes from. When I worked at Adzerk, we'd be approached occasionally by companies doing this kind of garbage. They were always very good at disguising their actual traffic sources. Our sales team had to be very adept at asking the right questions to eliminate the shitty partners quickly.
55555 10y ago
It's pretty easy to compartmentalize your staff. In fact, it's necessary, as it allows people to not feel "responsible" even when aware that they are doing something wrong. So one person makes the sales calls, and another ships the products, and another makes the products, and another does the billing, and they're all just executing SOPs and minding their own business...

dec0dedab0de 10y ago

I went to a meetup that they hosted once, and it was pretty obvious that they were up to something, but they did have a really cool office.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
I visited Limewire's offices, once. Three story office in Tribeca, with giant kitchens that were bigger than my apartment, game rooms, the works. It seems to me that the more ambiguous your business strategy is, the more you have to show off to convince others that it isn't.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- draw_down 10y ago
  I think it's more like, if you have a cool office with nice kitchens you can pay your employees crap and they still think they're getting a great deal.

donretag 10y ago

I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing coughpyramidschemecough company similar to Herbalife. They purchased us for our technology to power their platform. There was supposed to be very little overlap with their business, so I did not feel too worried about it. As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked, and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned down requests to work remotely. None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.

tswartz 10y ago
Now I'm curious... How did they sell the change in focus to your team/company? What aspects about MLM did you find most surprising?
- donretag 10y ago
  There was no change in focus per se. The company was an e-commerce site, and the parent company was going to simply be another vendor. They were using our in-house technology to power their external (to us) e-commerce presence, besides the placement of their products on our site. However, their products started to receive more and more focus on our site. If their highly profitable products had competitors in certain categories, we would eliminate those other products. SEO was optimized for those products. The underlying tech focus did not change. The UI team continued working on UIs, mobile teams on the app, etc. MLM was/is designed to fail. The barriers of entry for any form of compensation were incredibly high. If you satisfied some requirement of the program, there would be another one that was not achieved, invalidating any profits. I had zero insights on the parent company's network, but I simply do not see how a new person could make any money at all. Although our location, at least those in tech, had nothing to do with the MLM program, except for putting the products on the site (through the standard vendor process), it was still uneasy to be part of. I was not starving. I had a choice to not be part of it, so I exercised that choice. I should add the MLMs are completely legal under strict federal guidelines. Nothing illegal was happening, it was a bit too immoral for my personal standards.

al_chemist 10y ago

It's good to hear that all the C[ETF]Os of adware business found their employment at Facebook/Google/Amazon.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Yeah, this jumped out at me too. I'm not very reassured about such morally dubious characters working for companies that control most of our digital lives.

notacoward 10y ago

Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point. My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.

danenania 10y ago
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
- mk89 10y ago
  indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Possibly. However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.
    - jrowley 10y ago

zekevermillion 10y ago

There are many businesses that are built around exploiting vulnerable customers or users, and it is common for such businesses to have contrived complicated ethical justifications for their conduct. I'm thinking in particular of law and finance.

dharma1 10y ago

I had no idea there is a such a large industry doing this type of stuff until building a Windows 10 machine recently for VR. So many "free", seemingly kosher apps seem to install sneaky adware in the main app installation process these days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-unicorn-ironsource-raises-105-million-ahead-of-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-un...

TheRealDunkirk 10y ago

> “Like, man, this is a really nice office,” he recalls thinking. “Open floor plan...” So "Tyler" wasn't a programmer, then. Got it.

tomp 10y ago
Not everybody dislikes an open floor plan.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  You're right of cause, but strangely enough I never meet anyone who liked open floor plans that didn't have a pair of head phones glued to their head half the day. It's personal preference of cause, but I believe that the disadvantages starts to cancel out any benefits at around 6-8 people per office.
mfringel 10y ago
He also didn't like octagonal windows, and definitely used a spatula when making omelettes.
recursive 10y ago
Programmers don't have to dislike open floor plans. I know this because I am one.
- suprfsat 10y ago
  I sexually identify as an open floor plan.
puranjay 10y ago
Any kind of task that requires long periods of concentration is unfit for an open floor plan. I'm a writer and man, I hate writing with people around me

pdkl95 10y ago

> you’d see ads on sites like Wikipedia or Target.com Normally we call that vandalism. They should be facing criminal charges, not civil lawsuits and pressure from Google.

ikeboy 10y ago
There's no case afaik, because they disclose everything in the original agreement when you install their software. Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like for cigarettes)?
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. True, iff the customer was adequately informed about the offer in a way most people will understand. Contracts are not supposed to be a "gotcha" with extra terms buried in the fine print. If the installer only featured the "bait" and mentioned the adware behind a dark pattern UI or deep in the text of the contract, a judge could (and should) void that part of the contract. > Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent At a minimum. That said, the issue isn't really with the person that installs the software. There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    >a judge could (and should) void that part of the contract. There's a difference between voiding a contract that no longer obligates people, and voiding a contract to make actions taken under it illegal. I'm not sure there's good precedent for the latter. >There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia. They're not touching Wikipedia, they're running on the user's computer and manipulating their local served page of Wikipedia. I don't see why anyone else would have a case.
    - spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

univalent 10y ago

This is like the Mickey Mouse version of the 'The Firm'.

yardie 10y ago

I worked at a company very briefly in the early aughts. I thought I was hired to be on the team that built the platform. But before we would do that we needed to have a list of beta users. So my job was writing bots that scoured forums and other social networks for contact information (emails, phone numbers, names, etc.) It took me a week to realize what I was actually doing then another week to plan and execute my escape. The rest of the team were east european and did not give a fuck about what they were doing, it was good money to them. They eventually did release a product with a few thousand users. Not long after, Facebook changed their signup strategy from schools to the general public and the rest is history.

BradyDale 10y ago

Worth noting that the reporter on this story is a beat reporter who has been covering the Philadelphia tech scene closely for years now. She knows it like no one else.

kmano8 10y ago
Agreed- Juliana is top-shelf.

vas123 10y ago

Sometimes this adware crap hijacks legitimate open source projects as well and installs on unsuspecting users like this guy: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825 https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825

anandjoseph 10y ago

I met a guy at an open house. He said, "we are like ebay, but a lot cooler". He was wearing a silkroad t-shirt.

jobigoud 10y ago

I also always wonder how the people working on engineering land mines do.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
I once had a conversation with someone who had worked on surface-to-surface missile guidance. He did it because he didn't make the connection between the circuits and the software in front of him and the deaths they caused. Then there was a war and he saw the missiles on the news with pictures of casualties, and suddenly it was "Holy fuck - this stuff actually kills people!" Some people think small picture, and he just couldn't get from the work on his desk to dead bodies without the help of front-line footage. Of course there are also people who are just fine with that kind of work. I don't understand that ethical space at all - but from what I've seen they simply don't understand why anyone would have a problem with what they do.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
  You have to decide when you work for miltech or any dual use tech company if you are cool with it. At my first job (hydrodynamics R&D)I was tasked with analyzing high sped files from one of our test rigs. It was quite obvious what the rig was simulating and my office mates said oh yes thats REDACTED the Update to REDATED - I had to sit down and think how I felt about this. I do draw the line a at Chem, Bio and Payday Loans.
- burfog 10y ago
  Yeah, understanding the other side is difficult. I'll try to explain the other side, but it probably won't make sense to you. (as your side makes no sense to me) The trouble is that people can have fundamentally different value systems, priorities, and fears. Maybe the best way to explain it is to say how you appear to the other side. I'm sure you will disagree, which is kind of the point. You look kind of naïve and childish. You appear to believe in some utopian fantasy where all people are good and have or can be converted to a value system that is like your own, with the possible exception of conservatives. You fail to make any effort to protect your nation and culture from being overrun by the brutish, violent, and lazy. You somehow imagine that people from places like Syria and Mexico make better neighbors than many of the conservative people in your own country. Basically, your views fail at self-preservation. You are in denial of the historic fact that every nation is built upon a hill of skulls, and the fact that this is the natural way of nature. You imagine that you can refuse to pile up skulls without becoming part of the pile. If your world were real, I'd rather live in it. I'm not going to deny reality just because I don't like it. Conflict is eternal. I prefer that my people win. It's actually unethical to avoid the conflict. You're ceding ground to the enemy. You let down your descendants, friends, and neighbors. They will be impovershed, killed, and -- as we've seen with ISIS -- enslaved. This shit really happens. It may take decades or even centuries, but every bit of inaction and appeasement brings that day closer. For some reason, you push risk and long-term bad consequences out of your mind. It's like you can't see them. You focus on the positive only, kind of like a gambler. Your optimism probably makes you a happier person. :-)

eastbayjake 10y ago

Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack

jmcgough 10y ago
It sounds like they danced around the question when asked directly by someone not in the company.
hrktb 10y ago
More generally, not knowing how a company makes money should be a huge problem for someone candidating. Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.

seibelj 10y ago

Interviewed at a company called Rakuten Loyalty in Boston a few years ago. At that time it was the exact same thing, a malware / adware browser toolbar company, and they also sold white label toolbars. Took me the entire interview to figure out what they actually did. Their website [0] now has very little information about what they actually do, with a generic contact form. But an archive.org [1] of their old website shows the truth. Funny how they hide what they actually do now. [0] http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloyalty.com/solutions https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloy...

hkmurakami 10y ago
I guess I'm not entirely shocked since Rakuten the parent company and Japanese ecommerce site has very questionable tactics like emails you can't opt out of and forcing new employees to sign up a large number of friends/relatives to the Rakuten credit card.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Huh? How exactly did the "force" you to get others to sign up for a CC? I also have no problem opting out of Rakuten emails.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    New employees at HQ have quotas.
cjbprime 10y ago
Hah, wow. I went to JS meetups at their office without realizing that.
- ErikAugust 10y ago
  AngularJS meetup? Yeah, that office was posh!

pavel_lishin 10y ago

I worked at a web development studio. One of our clients was MannaTech, basically a marketing company that sold snake-oil to parents of sick children, claiming it could "cure" everything from cancer to down syndrome. They were under investigation by the Texas DA at one point. We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually does cure cancer in children, but it still irks me to this day.

usefulcat 10y ago
You know it's bad when Texas is willing to investigate. Source: am a long time resident of TX; it's business-friendly reputation is well earned, IMO.
NoGravitas 10y ago
Looked this up, and it's not only selling snake-oil to parents of sick children, it's MLM selling snake oil to parents of sick children. I honestly didn't think such a level of depravity was possible. Oh, and they had Ben Carson for a spokesman for a while. Amazing.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Yeah. My new policy is that if an employer wants to have any sort of business dealings with MannaRelief or MannaTech, it's them or me - I'll walk away.

pnathan 10y ago

whenever I am looking at a company, I google it, I scrape Glassdoor, I look for news articles about it. "How do you make money" is usually on the menu of "things I specifically care about". I'd advise others do do the same. Learn well what the company you're talking to does to earn a buck and who they are beholden to. I avoid adtech, myself.

coldcode 10y ago

I interviewed three times at a company once which didn't seem to have a clear business model. Only in the last interview with the CEO did I realize he was running a ponzi scheme.

aresant 10y ago

So what else is new. If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today. Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1). Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2) Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3) 50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company. (1) http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percent-of-facebooks-revenues-in-q1/ http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percen... (2) http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-in-the-affiliate-industry/ http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-... & http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in-affiliate-marketing-is-starting-to-sound-a-lot-like-me/ http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in... & http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a... (3) https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-generated-online-ads-prescription-drug-sales-canadian-online https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g... & https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/

hkmurakami 10y ago
> Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? This was cited in the FB S1 filing, which was around March 2012, so you are correct.
smt88 10y ago
One major difference is that Facebook and Google also provide value to their users. They do good and bad things. The company in the article did only bad things.

socrates1998 10y ago

Working at this type of company will eat at your soul. Really, you only have about 40 years of work in you. It sounds like a lot, but when you consider is takes a few years (sometimes more) to figure out what you like. A few more to get good at it. And then you have maybe 20 peak years of productivity, you sure as hell don't want to spend any of it at something you can't respect. When you are done with your career at 60 or 65, you want to be able to look back and say "I did this" or "I created that" or "I helped this many people", not "I worked at that shitty adware company for 2 years because they have me free food and beer"

switz 10y ago

I interviewed at 50onRed a few years ago soon after I left college. I went through the interview process, received an offer, and was on the verge of accepting. It was at this point I realized that I barely understood what the company actually did. I set up another in-person interview, except this time with the roles reversed. I asked them to walk me through their products and platforms so I could better understand what I would be working on. Ten minutes in, I realized what I was looking at. I treaded water until the end of the interview and called them a few days later to decline the offer. The [engineering] team was solid, the tech was intriguing (a lot of expressjs microservices and interesting design patterns), and the offices were great. But given the wealth of compelling opportunities for javascript engineers, I couldn't come up with a good reason to work on something so insipid and manipulative. This article is strangely validating, perhaps in a schadenfreude kind of way.

spyspy 10y ago
I interviewed for a co-op position there and was turned down. I guess they saved me some time.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  What's a co-op position?
  - natdempk 10y ago
    Generally it's an extended internship as a supplemental part of a university curriculum.
    - xzel 10y ago
      Exactly. To further hypothesize, Drexel, a Philadelphia university, offers mostly 5 year degrees with co-ops which more often than not involve local Philadelphia companies.
      - 10y ago

settsu 10y ago

I worked in the user experience team at that one big American domain company (that's well known for mostly the wrong reasons.) Similar situation as the story: great coworkers, great pay, & great perks. One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links. Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was: make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that. Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the monetizing product first, of course.) And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2 offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime. Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...) I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no, it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies) and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by framing your product or service in a particular way.

TheAdamist 10y ago

I've been to a Python Meetup there previously, nice office, nice tech talks. Their sponsor overview certainly didn't disclose what they actually did. Makes me wonder about the other ad platforms in town.

Spooky23 10y ago

How do you not ask what the company does before joining as an FTE? Even discounting moral hazards... wouldn't you want to know what the mission is? Especially at a startup-y type of place?

lossolo 10y ago

Today my mother got AD on her phone with "Android update", it was a pop-up from one of normal sites she visit. So she touched "update now" as she normally do with system messages about update... Then she confirmed, then she got 2 SMS, in one that deal was finalized. WTF? I've checked with Orange and indeed she was charged and subscription was started, 20 euro a month for some 3 shitty sms per week. They have turned this subscription off. THIS practices should be stopped. This is really a plague, I see those on my desktop and phone on regular basis, i know they are fake updates but most people don't..

quikoa 10y ago
My mother had this as well but with a game. We simply reversed the charge and continued pay the subscription like normal. They made one vague attempt to get that extra money then gave up. While I'm not a lawyer I doubt such charges would stand up on court.
- 55555 10y ago
  Often the billing is directly on the phone bill which means the traditional chargeback system won't really help you (it's not a credit card charge and you probably don't want to try to chargeback your phone company). One interesting thing many people don't know is that telcos, almost always oligopolists, are themselves pocketing 30-50% of those fraudulent charges (as they are the payment processor and their rates are extremely high), which helps explain their ambivalence to these sorts of scams.
NEDM64 10y ago
I've seen an ad for GTA5 for iOS and Android (obvious scam) on Facebook, and thousands of people liking, and hundreds of comments, most seemed organic, of people tagging their friends. Copyright infringement + scam, right there on Facebook.
rasz_pl 10y ago
its trivial and free to block all the subscription sms 'services' aka scams in Poland, and probably the rest of EU.

askyourmother 10y ago

I remember interviewing for a search company, but then found most of the work and business was spent on adverts! No thanks Google!

alaskanloops 10y ago

Odd that there aren't any visitor posts on their facebook page..

arcticbull 10y ago

I'd always wondered how all those Bond villains got their henchmen to work on crazy remote islands. I guess the perks were good! Just don't ask what we do ^_^

stordoff 10y ago

Mildly off-topic, but why do sites like this highlight the "top highlight"? I always find it really off-putting (in a "Oh, you tracking EVERYTHING I do" sort of way")

alanh 10y ago
"sites like this" = Medium.com sub-brands. I don’t know why Medium chooses to do that. I dislike it, too.
dredmorbius 10y ago
"Nice reading interest you have there. I'd hate to see anything happen to it." </godfather>

mrweasel 10y ago

>Gill tells me he doesn’t consider himself in the adware business. He prefers, instead, to describe 50onRed as a company that keeps content free for users. I love that bit. How does injecting ads into random sites help keep content free for users? Who's buying those ads by the way? Sure it sound like a terrible company, but I can help thinking that their customers are worse.

etjossem 10y ago
If anything, hijacking page real estate makes it less likely the user will click on non-injected ads (which actually pay something out to the content creator). I believe content creators have a right to seek compensation for their work - whether it's through ads, affiliate links, or a subscription model. But what 50onRed does is thievery from the creators, plain and simple.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zem 10y ago

i'm surprised the article never explicitly spelt out the main point - for most people, accepting a job offer is a major sunk cost, so it's a lot harder to quit a job even after a few months than it is to reject an offer from the outset. i'm pretty sure 50onred were counting on that.

daheza 10y ago

My friend works at Spokeo. If you don't know about them they are basically a people search engine. He keeps asking me to work there, but I just cant get over the moral implications of scrapping peoples lives and putting it up for viewing for a price. Something about the product just scratches me wrong so I haven't applied. It is really too bad as their tech seems solid and the offices are amazing.

gaius 10y ago

advertisers feel duped when they pay top dollar for what they believe to be “genuine, legitimate, honest ads Yeah right. No clean hands in that game.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

There was an interesting defcon talk a few years back from someone who was a malware developer about his experiences working at a job developing malware. https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I