3 ms·

My guess: you were in ads/targeting. And at most a Director. i.e. mostly operations. The people in targeting/demand/supply knows absolutely nothing about profi

My guess: you were in ads/targeting. And at most a Director. i.e. mostly operations. The people in targeting/demand/supply knows absolutely nothing about profile building. And there is where all the competitive advantages lies. And also all the shady deals. We usually keep everything very secret in profile building because that is the knowledge that allows people to leave and start competitors, but we disguise it as the usual think-of-the-children and say that profile building deals with all sort of borderline-PII and only the most vetted people should work on it. Ask some sysadmin to list the ACL to the main ads profile HDFS or whatever it is today. it will show a couple architects who report to one SVP each.

benreesman 3y ago
A remarkably astute analysis based on very limited information. My job was to use information retrieval, machine learning / AI, auction theory, and pragmatic statistical sampling to both accurately model and stably price ads inventory and later dollarized organic inventory to drive specific policy agendas about what got clicked on, dwelled on, commented on, seen in recommender systems in equilibrium to achieve specific policy agendas of various kinds but all ultimately tying out at top-line revenue and engagement metrics. It did not take me long to work out that PII was useless in this pursuit, there’s no entropy in the off-property like button table as concerns CTR. It did not take me long to realize that I didn’t want to know what it was useful for. I easily had the seniority to run queries against Hive tables that I had an explicit personal priority of never querying. And I left the senior leadership track at the last stop before a directorship.
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  oh the "monetization wizard" team. driving excel with hundreds of sheets to squeeze regulated products till the last drop. while documenting all the tweaks for the next round of certification with trepidly named forprofit industry self regulatory watch dogs. all the sexy stuff like Bluetooth beacon, and reverse email targeting etc are all before your team, because they're still not regulated and are profitable. i bet the team just got to turn DOoH knobs last years?
  - benreesman 3y ago
    There’s a new thing happening in Silicon Valley particularly and technology generally: we don’t need people like you anymore. As with a lot of terms, “brogrammer” is one that initially referred to something progressive but got co-opted by the kind of people whose value add is “shady games”. There’s a breed of elite hackers now who understand power dynamics, the importance of optics, the value that accrues to which parts of the apparatus, and daydreams while outmaneuvering anyone who ever contemplated an MBA, which is an admission that you can’t hack it when the distributions go non-stationary or the wire-to-wire latency target at 7 nines is below a mike. I don’t generally like to call attention to this, but my friend and former colleague Antonio Garcia Martinez of Goldman, Cal applied physics, Silicon Valley, and many other kinds of fame was very gracious to me in a NYT best-seller about a great many things but among them how I was a kind of synthesis of the kind of people who (as stereotyping would have it) were either basement-dwelling geeks or glib salesmen with Anglican/Presbyterian-sounding names. Buy the book if you care. Nick Schrock had found my photograph on the Internet and made it a Facebook cult classic at least a year before I joined in the Palo Alto office. Which is pretty early that I was #336 on the SWE staff. There is a lot of scope for value-add from the kinds of people who the ignorant and prejudiced stereotype as “nerds”: those people in my experience are generally kind, humane, humble, and brilliant. I’m just humane and brilliant, and I’m going to personally salt the Earth where people who talk like you do once stood. And I’ve got no compunctions about leveraging my appearance or height or dress sense or glib vocabulary, or ease in dominating a meeting to do so. Selective pressures have produced a breed that is simultaneously the prom king and likely to end up with a Turing, and do it all without pillaging the commons or appealing to connections. And if any of this rubs you the wrong way, we can step outside and handle it there. You don’t want that.
    - 1oooqooq 3y ago
      you are a tool. like i was when in ad fueled tech. you have no grasp of the business, but you made bank thanks to people who made much much more and did understand all the shady deals they had you unknowingly work towards.
      - 3y ago

benreesman 3y ago

A remarkably astute analysis based on very limited information. My job was to use information retrieval, machine learning / AI, auction theory, and pragmatic statistical sampling to both accurately model and stably price ads inventory and later dollarized organic inventory to drive specific policy agendas about what got clicked on, dwelled on, commented on, seen in recommender systems in equilibrium to achieve specific policy agendas of various kinds but all ultimately tying out at top-line revenue and engagement metrics. It did not take me long to work out that PII was useless in this pursuit, there’s no entropy in the off-property like button table as concerns CTR. It did not take me long to realize that I didn’t want to know what it was useful for. I easily had the seniority to run queries against Hive tables that I had an explicit personal priority of never querying. And I left the senior leadership track at the last stop before a directorship.

1oooqooq 3y ago
oh the "monetization wizard" team. driving excel with hundreds of sheets to squeeze regulated products till the last drop. while documenting all the tweaks for the next round of certification with trepidly named forprofit industry self regulatory watch dogs. all the sexy stuff like Bluetooth beacon, and reverse email targeting etc are all before your team, because they're still not regulated and are profitable. i bet the team just got to turn DOoH knobs last years?
- benreesman 3y ago
  There’s a new thing happening in Silicon Valley particularly and technology generally: we don’t need people like you anymore. As with a lot of terms, “brogrammer” is one that initially referred to something progressive but got co-opted by the kind of people whose value add is “shady games”. There’s a breed of elite hackers now who understand power dynamics, the importance of optics, the value that accrues to which parts of the apparatus, and daydreams while outmaneuvering anyone who ever contemplated an MBA, which is an admission that you can’t hack it when the distributions go non-stationary or the wire-to-wire latency target at 7 nines is below a mike. I don’t generally like to call attention to this, but my friend and former colleague Antonio Garcia Martinez of Goldman, Cal applied physics, Silicon Valley, and many other kinds of fame was very gracious to me in a NYT best-seller about a great many things but among them how I was a kind of synthesis of the kind of people who (as stereotyping would have it) were either basement-dwelling geeks or glib salesmen with Anglican/Presbyterian-sounding names. Buy the book if you care. Nick Schrock had found my photograph on the Internet and made it a Facebook cult classic at least a year before I joined in the Palo Alto office. Which is pretty early that I was #336 on the SWE staff. There is a lot of scope for value-add from the kinds of people who the ignorant and prejudiced stereotype as “nerds”: those people in my experience are generally kind, humane, humble, and brilliant. I’m just humane and brilliant, and I’m going to personally salt the Earth where people who talk like you do once stood. And I’ve got no compunctions about leveraging my appearance or height or dress sense or glib vocabulary, or ease in dominating a meeting to do so. Selective pressures have produced a breed that is simultaneously the prom king and likely to end up with a Turing, and do it all without pillaging the commons or appealing to connections. And if any of this rubs you the wrong way, we can step outside and handle it there. You don’t want that.
  - 1oooqooq 3y ago
    you are a tool. like i was when in ad fueled tech. you have no grasp of the business, but you made bank thanks to people who made much much more and did understand all the shady deals they had you unknowingly work towards.
    - 3y ago