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The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however:
by sireat 7y ago
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects).
The following CV line stands out however:
Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016.
Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations.
How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?
I am not blaming the author as I would have done the same(and I imagine author was not told when hired that he'd be working on Java/Angular ad tool).
Again it is not that Java or Angular are bad per se, but working on ad CRUD seems completely orthogonal to author's talents.
- metaweta 7y agoYeah, and it's why I left that job for something else.
- theblueprint 7y agoThank you for your work on PRTK. As a forensic practitioner during your time at AD, it was always an invaluable tool in my kit.
- aeontech 7y agoWhat's the best way to reach you? I know a few people who might be quite interested and interesting to work with.
- metaweta 7y agometaweta@gmail.com
- TrackerFF 7y agoGetting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.
- brailsafe 7y agoWorking in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
- tyrust 7y agoOne can exercise motivation outside of work.
- ronyfadel 7y agoIt’s hard to do when you get home with 0 brain power left after working for 8-10 hours straight doing mind-numbing work
- brailsafe 7y agoNo doubt, that's how most people do it. But ideally you don't want your life to be one of hating most of what you're doing and then just compensating for it in a way that keeps the feedback loop working.
- marcinzm 7y agoWhy be unhappy for 8+ hours a day? Life is short enough as it is, sacrificing 1/4 of it seems rather silly to me unless you have to.
- jodrellblank 7y ago> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did". Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joosters 7y agoNever going to happen. Look at other important jobs - doctors and nurses can have very low wages, while professional footballers earn millions. We all know which one is more important, but there's no way the medics will ever get paid comparably.
- wolco 7y agoSome top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures. Frontline workers testing people will never make that amount because the skill level is lower so more people can do the work. If everyone refused and only a handful of people were left they couldn't reproduce the same impact anyhow and the program would close instead of paying them millions. Together they have a big impact and one on one they have a big impact but a single first responder doesn't have the attention or connection of millions. Would you put a poster of Jill, Nurse 56 from Grandrapids who works in the covid wing cleaning sheets? Probably not, even though the job is extremely important.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago>Some top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures // Ethically?
- wolco 7y agoSure everything from plastic surgeons to heart specialists. Not everyone has to be a doctor to the stars or go on shark tank to make millions. Does your local walkin clinic doctor make that? No, but would make 500k before expensives.
- dirtydroog 7y agoActually, being involved in ad tech can get you involved in some really cool tech. It's an incredibly fast-paced industry, lots of parallels to HFT. And yes, everyone in the industry knows that ads don't work, you have all the ad blockers, etc.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhy work on something that you know doesn't work and makes the world worse?
- Baeocystin 7y agoSome people are absolutely OK with that. Some people, it bothers deeply. Same about weapons work, or other engineering tasks of various applicable moralities. We all have to make our choices. I know I've worked on things of minimal value, just because I needed to pay for life. I've switched to other things when able.
- lonelappde 7y agoThere's nothing unfairly wrong with Google Ads. It's the trackers that are bad.
- nicoburns 7y agoAnd who do you think makes the trackers?
- FabHK 7y ago> lots of parallels to HFT. Including the fact that it might make its practitioners rich, while creating nothing of social value.
- sudosysgen 7y agoIn the case of ads, arguably negative social value.
- starpilot 7y agoI'm starting to consider any company whose revenue primarily comes from ads to be immoral. It's the business of hijacking people's minds. Part of this means stimulating the worst aspects of thinking: addiction, fear, pain, all that ads seek to satisfy.
- riquito 7y agoYou open a business. You sell something or offer a service. Day one is "let people know that I exist". Pretty much every form this take is advertising. No business live without making its customers aware of it. It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it. Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.
- andrepd 7y agoDiscovery is a problem that can be solved in a million other methods. If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery. Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then?
- riquito 7y ago> If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery. Hardly. You buy a domain name, put something on it and then what, wait for an independent reviewer to monitor the registrars? And that review would be discovered how? > Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then? I have no idea how did you reach that conclusion from what I wrote.
- Erwin 7y agoLooks like the Google job was relaxing enough to complete a PhD in Computer Science in 2015 at the same time.
- lonelappde 7y agoHad to squeeze in th PhD after > Biosimilarity, LLC: Partner. February 2013–May 2014. Developed a decentralized massively scalable database based on the π-calculus and a secure distributed social network
- kleer001 7y ago> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? The sentiment is a bit older than ads. It goes: " I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull," Howl by Allen Ginsberg: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
- DavidAdams 7y agoSome might consider your post to be off-topic or worse a "well, actually" interjection, I found it fascinating to learn the source of the "best minds of my generation" framing. Thanks.
- c3534l 7y agoI see no reason to think Ginsberg originated the phrase "best minds of a generation," but it doesn't appear cliche enough of a phrase to even have an etymology I could look up.
- cambalache 7y agoI understand and agree with your point but I think this site overvalues CS graduates by a lot. There are bright minds everywhere, doing math, physics, literature, medicine, law and a long etc. That "some" minds, because of greed/need-to-subsistence or whatever the reason choose that path is a shame but hardly a loss in the great scheme of things. Most intellectual pursuits are already fiercely competitive as it is.
- lonelappde 7y agoYou might want to read OPs's CV before dismissing his brightness
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ur-whale 7y agoThis kind of story is pretty standard at Google: 1. Hire the best of the best, typically PhD level. 2. Assign them to random crap project that have precious little to do with their specialty and strengths. 3. Assume that if they were smart enough to earn a PhD on topic X, they'll learn quickly how to do work on Y, even if X and Y are completely unrelated.
- DeathArrow 7y agoI've seen some CS and math PhD grads being employed for software engineering roles where all that mattered was knowing framework X by heart, memorizing GoF patterns, TDD, DDD, SOLID, clean code and all what uncle Bob was preaching in the '90s and early 2000. I think both CS and software engineering have their own importance but they are not the same. It's better to hire the right person for the job.
- mister_hn 7y agoSometimes you have no choices than working on something not fitting your skills. Imagine those with a university degree working at McDonald's serving menus
- blazespin 7y agoWasn't Einstein a patent clerk? Can't imagine working on glue code at Google is all that bad.