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I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks
by locklock 8y ago
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
- benologist 8y agoThere are worse jobs at Facebook.... https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596 Imagine being part of the gaggle of fuckheads who decided to not implement simple preventative measures that made it harder for children to accidentally spend thousands of dollars in manipulative games. Or their peers who who helped strategize more effective tricks for game developers to use so children would be more likely to need a multi-thousand dollar refund Facebook could refuse.
- sjg007 8y agoThis is on the VPs and Zuckerberg really. I am actually surprised because credit cards companies would likely side with the card holder.. and Facebook had enough money in the bank where growth was their primary concern. It's not like they weren't going to turn on ads at some point, so the premature optimization here for money seems short sighted in hind sight. I remember when developing Facebook apps was all the rage and you could make some serious $$$. That in turn led to the data sharing scandals we see today. Both the game monetization and data sharing strategies will have probably hurt Facebook overall than if they just pursued an ads strategy... especially if Congress and the EU crack down.
- badgers 8y agoThat reminds me of a quote about dentistry: "You're in a career where nobody wants to see you and you're the last place they want to come back to and it's depressing." (https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-really-more-prone-to-suicide https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-rea...)
- dsr_ 8y agoA dentist's parents are usually proud of them. "What are you doing at work these days, kid?" "I'm inventing new ways to make people see advertising." "Have you considered doing something positive with your life?"
- hamandcheese 8y ago“I’m working a super cushy job making twice as much as I could most other places, mom!” “Proud of you!”
- _underfl0w_ 8y agoThis is the realistic scenario, unfortunately, since the "users" in this scenario wouldn't understand the distinction between one tech job and another. Substitute that job for one selling drugs with better, more consistent pay and... well... then it's culturally frowned upon by non-tech-savvy people. Deliberately spreading "fake news" is the advertising equivalent.
- justapassenger 8y agoMy wife is genuinely happy to see ads. My parents are happy, that their small business can advertise, that allow them to sell product, pay their employees and support themselves. Ads aren't root of all evil.
- porpoisely 8y agoYou are fooling yourself if you think the parents' of facebook employees' aren't proud of them. What's with the neverending facebook bashing. So much of it is propagandistic and unreasonable. It's funny how the media says something and so many people just parrot it. Do you really believe parents are disappointed that their child works for one of the most important companies in the world? Where the average salary is double what the average dentist makes?
- Barrin92 8y agoI mean, my parents never raised me to judge the value of my job by the size of the paycheck or the size of the company, so yes they would likely be disappointed if I worked at such a job. Career tobacco lobbyists probably make ten times as much money as your average dentist and work for very important companies, but I don't know any parent who would be proud of their kid being a poison vendor rather than a doctor
- ryanSrich 8y agoThere's a reason why they have to pay people $300k+. Money talks.
- alexgrcs 8y agoThat sounds exactly like my current job. :(
- spyspy 8y agoEthics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
- ben_jones 8y agoI'm sure there were a lot of interesting challenges creating the V2 rocket that terrorized London...
- bsagdiyev 8y agoLittle over an hour for the Nazi comparison
- jshap70 8y agothis is laughably hyperbolic
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoNot wanting to turn into a Nazi apologist but to play devil's advocate for a minute, that very same research put people in space as well as creating our current communications infrastructure.
- gilrain 8y ago"Not wanting to turn into a Nazi apologist but"
- 8y ago
- iheartpotatoes 8y agoYeah but what if your salary was north of $150/yr + stock and you were in your 20's? I'd be all over that back then. Hell, I'd be all over that now!
- megous 8y agoAre you like from CAR or Congo?
- davnn 8y agolikely from implicit k.
- lghh 8y agoThere isn't enough money in the world for me to want to have a job who's goal is to make the world a worse place.
- iheartpotatoes 8y agoSo what do you do now? Clean up beaches? Work with the poor? Public defender? Something similarly saintly I presume...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoThe dev working on this spent 6 months doing leetcode day in and day out prepping for the interview just to get this exciting new opportunity.
- duxup 8y agoIt sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.
- nolok 8y agoMuch harder when you're working on a product you also happen to love and use. And it creeps up, more and more, one ad there, and one more, and an inerstitial, and then inside the emails too, let's hide the hide amongst the real stuff and ... At some point you feel like you're desecrating a body.
- duxup 8y agoNo doubt about it man, that happens. I don't disagree.
- rchaud 8y agoThose two scenarios aren't mutually exclusive. One hand washes the other, the distinction is only between who gives the order and who carries it out.
- duxup 8y agoI think you can have "legitimate ads". I think plenty of people are happy to do illegitimate things with them too, and Facebook is as dirty as it gets, but that doesn't mean ads can't be fairly mutually exclusive from scams, fake news, and etc if someone wanted them to be.
- hobs 8y agoDo you think creating something that goes counter to your users desire is not unscrupulous? The only difference between the first stage of the pipeline and the rest is a matter of degree.
- Kiro 8y agoI wouldn't mind. Sounds like a fun problem.
- nolok 8y agoIf you want to feel truly lost, wait for the time where you're working on a product, nothing to do with the ads part, and then people higher up ask you to break parts of it because it "breaks ads". That's when you feel lucky to work in a field where you can just say "that's it, I'm done here" and cross the street to find a new job.
- manigandham 8y agoThere's another homepage thread about Spotify doing the same thing and that's received positively. When you deliver value to billions of people who don't want to pay, ads are part of the package. And those ads have helped thousands of companies grow and provide all those other fun jobs. The amount of hate advertising gets is just silly. It'd be great if we could push personal responsibility with even 1/10th of the effort.
- whywhywhywhy 8y agoSame way how Face ID is cheered for and Windows Hello is “creepy” Same concept. Very similar implementation but company brand goes a hell of a long way.
- rwz 8y agoI think the main reason is that Spotify provides an option to pay them and not deal with all this bullshit. Facebook doesn't.
- nbush 8y agoI remember doing this as a CSS copy-protection joke back in 2013. [1] Seems like a similarly petty thing for a company like FB to try and like many have said an extremely low-level arms race. [1] https://github.com/nbush/headache https://github.com/nbush/headache
- hateful 8y agoI interviewed for a job almost 20 years ago that where I would have been tweaking banner ads to get through. I turned it down.
- sizzle 8y agoA huge reason a lot of people take these jobs is the insane TC (total compensation) complete with eye popping bonuses/RSUs that non FAANG can't touch considering they expect you to be grateful for their 1-4% annual increase at your typical Fortune 500.
- nine_k 8y agoRight now I'm looking for a job, and I consciously reject interview requests with adtech companies. I don't want to work for a company products of which I would rather not use, and help others to avoid using.
- dwild 8y ago> Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads. It's not so much different than patching an hole in your payment system to make sure it can't be bypassed. I sure don't want to have to pay for plenty product, yet it's perfectly valid for them to expect to get paid. Same goes for ads, it's the cost to use that product, whether you like it or not. It's a sad state to be where people works so hard to not have to pay. I agree that's an awful usage of a developer time, but the same apply to a payment system.
- jachee 8y agoI find that avoiding ads isn't avoiding wanting to pay for a product. It's avoiding wanting to be a product. If my attention has value, then I get to determine what that value is. It's a sad state to be where corporations work so hard to steal people's time, attention and privacy and give them as little as possible in return.
- manigandham 8y ago> If my attention has value, then I get to determine what that value is. That's exactly what you're doing by using the product. You could spend your time doing something else, or paying to skip ads instead.
- jachee 8y agoWhere can I pay Facebook for the not-creepy, no-ads version?
- manigandham 8y agoThey don't offer that, but there are many other ways to communicate with people that you can choose from.
- rnvhhynr 8y agoI agree with your general point, but there's no paid version of Facebook that shows no ads and doesn't sell your info. (And, if there was, I'm sure it would bomb.)
- steve_adams_86 8y agoI did this. I helped build the Air Installer network. I truly regret it. If you look up that name, all you get is people worried that it installed viruses or malware (guess what... it did) and how to remove it. The other results you'll see include the owners trying to sell its virtues. As though it's anything other than a way to exploit unsuspecting internet users for money. I was young and naive, and I didn't think we were using it for malicious purposes. It ended up being worse than I imagined in the end. I left on bad terms and felt like a complete fool. These days I hear adtech companies pay well - I didn't even get that. Just a genuine waste of life and career time. I discourage as many developers as I can from going into adtech. I met the worst types of people in that industry.
- justplay 8y agoI was once a victim and it feels terrible. Since I had experienced it, I have big hate for such people. I don't want to write all my anger here, but please don't ever join such company.
- technion 8y agoI'd urge you to not be too hard on yourself. As much as people don't enjoy the morals of adtech, you got to experience scale, and apparently highly reliable code whilst early in your career. You can't blame yourself as a self described "young and naive" person for what others did later.