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Comment by monodeldiablo | Hacker News Reader

It's depressing how often I hear this sentiment. So I'll just repeat: Those are far from the only two options available.

Advertising makes up about 20% of the US economy. Is it really so hard to believe that there are rewarding, ethical jobs available in that other 80%?

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20% seems insanely high to me - do you have a source for this? First google hit for me returned this [1], which puts the number between 1% and 2% of GDP

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...

Yeah, that seems vastly more reasonable. I was quoting AdWeek (I know...) because it was the most conservative number available.

So yeah, let's be more realistic and say that advertising makes up 2% of GDP. There's got to be an ethical job in one of the industries making up the other 98%. I've never worked for an ad-supported business and I don't find employment difficult to come by...

Of course not. It's just that a lot of the biggest software companies—Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and to an extent, LinkedIn—are advertising companies

Twitter's not so bad. It is civically important. Revolutions grow because of Twitter. Opposing armies tweet menacingly at each other. And for better or worse, it is the current US President's primary mouthpiece.

That line of thinking is wrong and is similar to saying entire newspaper industry is "advertising" industry, just because their business model needs bulk of the revenue from Ads. I mean, newspaper journalism cannot sustain simply on subscription revenue. And just like newspapers have clear separation between news and ads, companies like Google have clear separation between Search and Ads.

So does that mean any journalist working on hardcore investigative journalism is working on advertising? If yes, your world view is a bit warped. If no, please explain why you think a Google search ranking engineer is essentially working on advertising?

I strenuously disagree that the previous poster's line of thinking is wrong.

Incentives matter. A lot. Companies who derive the vast majority of their revenue from advertising will have their culture and technological choices shaped by the underlying business needs.

Heavily marketing dozens of largely unsuccessful moon shots to keep people excited does very little to change this underlying analysis.

Newspaper business models continue to be mainly advertising driven, so I don't disagree with your analogy, just your conclusion. Advertising shaped journalism enormously even before that business model was crippled by Google and Facebook. I would have the same difficulty working for Buzzfeed as Google.

> Companies who derive the vast majority of their revenue from advertising will have their culture and technological choices shaped by the underlying business needs.

I worked at Google, on Search. My work (and my team and org's work) was never affected by Ads and how Ads worked. We just focused on making Search better. So I object to your imagination of how Google culture and choices are shaped.

I have many friends who have worked in Search in the last decade.

You seem to be interpreting "incentives and culture" as "explicit directives or pressure from Ads". There are many ways for culture to grow. Chinese walls can prevent many overt pathways from growing, but they aren't an antidote to the overall role incentives play inside companies.

Do you mind sharing some specific examples, rather than speaking in abstract?

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