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I think it's the financial sector, not ad-tech that's wasting the abilities of many bright people, at least in the USA.
by PopePompus 6y ago
I think it's the financial sector, not ad-tech that's wasting the abilities of many bright people, at least in the USA.
- jedberg 6y agoFintech pays better, but it seems like most new grads would rather go to FAANG, which in the case of GAF means adtech.
- goatinaboat 6y agowhich in the case of GAF means adtech I've lost track, which is A now? Only Facebook and Google are adtech, Apple wants to sell hardware and Amazon wants to do retail, adtech/surveillance capitalism could be banned tomorrow and both the A's would not skip a beat.
- jedberg 6y agoAmazon is an adtech company. 25% of their revenue came from ads in 2020.
- angott 6y agoAdtech is a major driver of growth for AWS products. See https://aws.amazon.com/advertising-marketing/ https://aws.amazon.com/advertising-marketing/. Amazon retail business also uses targeted advertising as part of their ad network: https://advertising.amazon.com/products/sponsored-display https://advertising.amazon.com/products/sponsored-display
- mindslight 6y agoIt's not either-or, it's all of the above. Military, commercial surveillance ("adtech"), finance, healthcare, legal, institutional administration. None of these things are entirely useless, but are still mostly zero-sum or redundant waste. Technological progress is continually making us more productive, but instead of realizing the gains (eg full time employment being under 10 hours per week by now), our economy is structured to keep creating endless make-work jobs. We're trapped in a paperclip maximizer for human labor.
- hermitcrab 6y agoA substantial proportion of the brightest people from my generation in the UK went to work in the city of London, where they were paid handsomely for moving numbers around spreadsheets for big finance companies. What a waste.