I sympathize to some extend, but I think it is unfair to characterize "Google, Twitter and Facebook" as only advertising companies. A lot of the engineering ef

I sympathize to some extend, but I think it is unfair to characterize "Google, Twitter and Facebook" as only advertising companies. A lot of the engineering effort at these companies goes into improving their core services, too. If you are working on Google's search engine, you are actually making the world's body of knowledge more easily accessible. This is a huge boon to the millions (or billions?) of people who use Google's free search engine every day. Arguably, many engineers can have a bigger positive impact on the world working at Google than they could have on their own. Similarly, Facebook allows millions of people to connect and communicate. Remember the revolution in Egypt? It started on Facebook. So yes, I agree that it is sad that so many smart people are working on how to serve ads more effectively. But the reason these internet companies serve ads is because they need to pay for the engineers and server farms that provide a service, which "nobody" is willing to pay for in cash. If you think you can do better (provide the service without covering the costs with advertising) please do, but until you demonstrate that this is possible, I think we'll have to take the bad with the good.