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There are definitely some exceptions -- it's what I do for a living. And yeah, this is big news in the space. Google is clearly making a move into online displ

There are definitely some exceptions -- it's what I do for a living. And yeah, this is big news in the space. Google is clearly making a move into online display advertising, having all but conquered direct-response. It'll be interesting to see how they do. Display advertising has a vastly different set of challenges associated with it -- brands care first and foremost about the safety of the pages they run on, which means Google will need to be a lot more selective about the publishers they partner with for display, and brand lift through display advertising is a lot harder to measure than direct-response conversions. (Obligatory plug if you're also one of the exceptions (or interested in being one): SAY Media, my employer, is hiring engineers! Check us out at http://www.saymedia.com/. http://www.saymedia.com/.)

pedoh 15y ago
Chalk me up as another one in the ad industry for a living. For me, the excitement of working in the ad industry comes not from the end product that we produce, but from the technical challenges we face. We're trying to serve ads in under 100 milliseconds. Not just a few. Hundreds of thousands, every second. The infrastructure and intelligent architecture to handle data at that speed and scale (not just for serving the ads, but doing reporting on them) is incredible. Downtime is not acceptable, so on the DevOps side of things we're monitoring everything carefully and often redundantly, and collecting hundreds of thousands of metrics every minute to give us many views into our system. Deployments happen multiple times daily, and our Engineers have sweet tools to roll out their code to all environments (okay, I'm a little biased, since I wrote a lot of those tools). If you want experience working on large scale projects, I'd say the ad industry is a good place to be. I imagine the finance divisions that have large infrastructures really close to the trading floor are also pretty amazing, although I have no personal experience. AppNexus is hiring, too. Hit me up with any questions, or go to http://appnexus.com/careers/ http://appnexus.com/careers/
whiletruefork 15y ago
Google overtook Yahoo as the largest display network last month, so it's a bit more then making a move at this point :) http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/ http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/

pedoh 15y ago

Chalk me up as another one in the ad industry for a living. For me, the excitement of working in the ad industry comes not from the end product that we produce, but from the technical challenges we face. We're trying to serve ads in under 100 milliseconds. Not just a few. Hundreds of thousands, every second. The infrastructure and intelligent architecture to handle data at that speed and scale (not just for serving the ads, but doing reporting on them) is incredible. Downtime is not acceptable, so on the DevOps side of things we're monitoring everything carefully and often redundantly, and collecting hundreds of thousands of metrics every minute to give us many views into our system. Deployments happen multiple times daily, and our Engineers have sweet tools to roll out their code to all environments (okay, I'm a little biased, since I wrote a lot of those tools). If you want experience working on large scale projects, I'd say the ad industry is a good place to be. I imagine the finance divisions that have large infrastructures really close to the trading floor are also pretty amazing, although I have no personal experience. AppNexus is hiring, too. Hit me up with any questions, or go to http://appnexus.com/careers/ http://appnexus.com/careers/

whiletruefork 15y ago

Google overtook Yahoo as the largest display network last month, so it's a bit more then making a move at this point :) http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/ http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/