I don’t think there’s any evidence to this whatsoever. Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop, being a software engineer does not give you magical brain powers and frankly it’s just textbook Dunning-Kruger.
Also, you have engineers/developpers like me who actively boycott products when the ad was too intrusive/take me for an idiot (sexualized ads do that for me). I've never bought a Ubisoft game since 2013 or a for the first reason (and avoid Razer), and the second one makes my toiletry shopping interesting.
In the same way we're still "affected" by rain because we have to use an umbrella or a raincoat, sure. Compensating for a known effect can come near or exactly the desired outcome.
There are plenty of examples of us knowing our biases but still being caught by them.
and Sponsor Block
https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/Android
Added onto our web browsers.
It frees up a lot of computer and mental resources to use tools that save you time and screen realestate.
The down side is if we all do it then the money must flow from somewhere other then your favorite advertizer.
I am not OP, but my interpretation was, that he knows how to remove injected ads. Not that he is invulnerable to ads. I might be wrong tho.
For myself I can definitely say that I am susceptible to advertisement, but I fulfill mostly the engineer cliché - for better or for worse.
Some examples are:
- technical details from manufacturers themselves (which are by definition advertisement)
- someone presenting a use case and solving it with a specific tool. If that use case sounds interesting to me I might actually try that tool. I cannot know if it is "real" advertisement or a genuine user in this case.
- looking for reputation on Reddit; again I cannot know if it is genuine users or advertisement - at least most of the time I can't
edit: formatting