Hacker News Reader

Comment by reallydude | Hacker News Reader

AdTech is wonderful, from a technical perspective. The standards are rich while the ecosystem is rife with opportunity.

If you are a developer in AdTech, you will NEVER hear about interaction, or see contract, with most of the companies listed...other than a handful (maybe FB, maybe Yahoo, maybe Instagram). I've worked for Experian (the US Company) and talking about them in the AdTech space is the same as talking about HN in the cooking recipe space. There's a tiny bit of overlap, but it's largely pointing to shoehorned third parties because that isn't something Experian's existing infrastructure performs.

AdTech is fun, it pays well, and you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. I have refused some pieces of work and AdTech is tolerant to negotiating concerns. I think most developers would benefit from experience in AdTech, even if it's just a short time.

View on HN

I worked in adtech for a bit and thought the tech was really subpar. The engineer’s goal is try and find edge cases where the privacy controls of the OS / browser have gaps so you can better target and serve more ads. The ads themselves are garbage. Very underwhelming experience. Also it’s a race to the bottom. No VC’s want to invest in adtech anymore given that old tech has monopolized it and regulations are coming. No career path. Stay away.

> you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates

Is this a euphemism for "test your moral fibre"? I had a similar experience with a company that later turned patent-troll - not sure I'd wish that on anyone (high stress, not rewarding).

>you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates.

That's the most generous way of phrasing it that I've ever heard... ;)

I worked at a startup in the intersection of social media and advertising, and the tech was indeed quite interesting. I built the core of a system that ended up storing hundreds of millions of records, with 24/7 data ingestion of tens of thousands of records per second. This was scale that I had never worked with before, and I learned a lot.

At the point in time I joined that company, I was explicitly looking for a job with interesting technical challenges. However, over the course of a couple of years, the tech mattered less and less, and the human component mattered more and more. I quit the job to get out of the industry.

I'm still not sure how to feel about my tenure there. I grew as an engineer and team lead, but I question if I made the world a little worse by helping companies improve their targeting abilities in social media.

Author here. The companies listed are by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, just illustrative examples. As long as Experian buys and sells consumer data (and in the Australian market, mosaic segments are often used and widely known) they'll be relevant to the point. I could rattle off a good two dozen names of AdTech companies, or companies making AdTech plays as a minor element of their business (like gosh dang adobe lol) and not even scratch the surface of the industry.

Fun, pays well, empowers the powerful, amplifies our biases, harms our society, makes life worse for the general populace

Reply on news.ycombinator.com