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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

I was flown out to California for an interview at Google, and while I didn't get the job, it shattered any desire I had to work there. I previously wanted to work "for the giants" because, well, money, and prestige, and "cool problems" etc.

Then I noticed every single person I met was involved with Advertising and tracking and tracking advertising. It was disgusting. I don't want to work on those kinds of "cool" problems.

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Well you must have accepted an interview for that kind of team (perhaps unknowlingly; this kind of thing can be quite opaque to the candidate a company like Google). Obviously not everyone at Google is working on ads and tracking. In fact, I would bet the farm that it's a minority under 5% if not under 1%.

I think yours is a good story -- it worked out for you. But, honestly, you didn't know Google's business was an advertising and tracking business? Don't know the exact number but I think it's still over 90% of their revenue is from ads. Come on.

I was just getting ready to graduate from college at the time. I understood google did a significant amount of advertising, but my introduction to google as a business was reading the initial search whitepaper from the 90s. I had assumed they at least had some remnant of "interesting sciency" search based stuff going on.

>Well you must have accepted an interview for that kind of team

No. My interview was as an infrastructure and internal software engineer.

The big thing that hit me was that every single person I talked to emphasized how you could switch projects/teams/orgs every year or so, so they had a wide range of experiences under their belt. Except to the man, every last one was about supporting Google's advertising

The only hint that google did something other than advertising on the entire campus was a statue of the Android mascot

That is the core of their business though and that fact seems pretty clear from basic research, what did you expect? If you find advertising/tracking reprehensible, why would you agree to an interview in the first place?

>I previously wanted to work "for the giants" because, well, money, and prestige, and "cool problems" etc.

I had fewer ethics then, as I was still basically a bright eyed kid. Also I had never been financially well off, and therefore had never really been able to afford being principled. And honestly I truly did not realize how pervasive advertising was for google.

> And honestly I truly did not realize how pervasive advertising was for google.

That sounds extremely naive. It's like being surprised by how pervasive basketball is for the LA Lakers. I mean, what exactly did you believed the company did?

Really? How many people outside of tech honestly understand that Google is 90% advertising and 10% "other" instead of more like 50% search company and 50% "other" like they tried to pretend to be for so long? Go ask your grandma what google does.

I was not born in Silicon Valley. Could have probably talked to you a little about potato farming though, and the purchase of Hannaford by Del Haize

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