That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel political. Throughout my team and the other teams we work closely with, I find my co-workers and superiors to be thoughtful, smart, open-minded, and really nice to work with.
Some years ago I was unsatisfied with my pay and I accepted the interview of a Giant Search corp, getting to the on-site interview. The lunch with random employees was perhaps the best part of the experience for me, as it became abundantly clear that a good chunk of devs that I had some conversation with outlined in very generic terms the same basic stuff everybody else needs to do in software: maintenance, basic infrastructure, scripts, and so on. Which is, you know, totally expected.
I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.
This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.
The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.
I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.
Having worked on the spend side of things and at high stakes (9 figure budgets), targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating. More than anything else I've done in my career, even. This is especially true when you have constraints, like being in a regulated industry such as legal marketing.
The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.
you try to make people click on ads, selling that as "extremely intellectually stimulating" sounds fancy but all you do is manipulate people and you're nothing more than a marketing guy with fancy tools. Do you really want to spend your career working on that? Why not use your power in some way that it actually helps people, even if that means that you earn a bit less.
I thought that I made it clear that I don't work on this anymore.
Advertising isn't an inherent evil. You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise.
I advertised for one specific company. I worked in an industry that was pretty grey. Some parts of the business were vaguely predatory and others served a great public social need. More importantly, you had to have an actual reason to fill out our forms and follow through with us. We weren't just desperately trying to get any eyeballs. The work that I did very much did help people.
Also you're not going to get much mileage shaming people for what they do for a living. You being reductive doesn't really reflect reality either. I was much more than some marketer and yes, the problems were extremely intellectually stimulating, otherwise I wouldn't have been there.
That's better than I can say for most of the quants I worked with -- they were almost all just in it for the money.
> You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise.
It’s funny you say that, because I found all three literally by looking at reviews and not advertisements. Those 3 categories are perfect examples of industries where referrals are far more reliable than choosing which one had the best ad budget.
A lot of reviews are just forms of advertisements.
Companies pay third parties lots of money to curate their reviews and put them in contact with the reviewer to smooth things over.
I know that because that's the business I work in now.
Companies still have a problem of getting their reviews surfaced to the top of your search. They also have a need to give people the lowest-friction way possible to leave them a positive score when it's the best time in the interaction to do so. There are many large enterprises competing in this space specifically.
The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
If having to reach out to real customers and fix their fuckups until they are happy enough to leave a good review, then I’m completely fine with that level of advertising. That’s just fixing your fuckups until your customers refer you, which is the best thing that you can hope for.
That has no relationship to the paid shitstorm of ads on Google.
Somewhat. A lot of review systems are designed to contact you asking for a review at the exact time you're most likely to leave a good review. The companies then optimize the whole customer interaction around that experience. To actually go back and edit that review when things change isn't always easy.
The overwhelming majority of all other reviews are either the Amazon variety (so a paid endorsement, usually) or from total cranks. People don't really often leave unsolicited reviews.
