Dan Luu
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Working at an ad supported company (or not)
🕑 Added 2019-12-09 09:08:38 +0000 UTCI have a lot of friends who refuse to work for an ad supported company. I get it. I think everything they say about the pernicious effects of ads is true. In terms of being good for the world, I put ads up there with hedge funds: possible to justify as not evil in an abstract way, but with plenty of downsides in reality.
But I don't think that companies that sell real products are all that much better, if they're better at all. I've worked for a few. Two of the three companies I worked for that sell ads also sell cloud services and I've also worked for a company that just sells a product, no ads (and I've also worked for a company that's basically an ad supported website with no side business).
At all of the companies that sell a product, whenever I've seen the interactions that go on between the company and their customers, I find them to be no better than what you expect from ads. Companies will straight-up lie to customers to make the sale. The bigger the sale, the more they're incentivized to lie. "Did we fix the cause of that outage? Oh yes, it's literally impossible for an outage like that to happen again", when there's no mitigation in place or even planned for the next quarter.
I don't begrudge anyone their preference if they don't want to work on ads, I'm just saying that I think that companies that sell products don't seem great either if your ethical preferences are to avoid lying and/or to avoid profiting from lying.
I've also volunteered for non-profits and I haven't found to be better either.
To be clear, I'm not saying that you can't avoid doing unethical things yourself. An excuse I've seen everywhere I've worked is
"oh Dan, you don't know how the world works, everyone does [unethical thing]".
No, I do know that many people do unethical things. I'm not perfect and I have no doubt that people consider some things I've done to be unethical, but that doesn't justify more unethical behavior. On a personal level, people can choose to a draw a line for their own behavior. Personally, I quit a job after being repeatedly asked for fabricate data for a paper (with the excuse above being used, of course) and fighting about that for months. I understand that's a very privileged position to be in, to be able to just walk away from a job with no regrets, but when I've heard people say that everyone else is doing bad stuff so we have to too, it hasn't been from someone who's figuratively held a gunpoint, it's been from someone with a lot of power to make a difference.
Anyway, above the personal level, at the company level, I can't really think of any companies that have scaled beyond a handful of people that I would consider to be generally ethical, whether they're ad supported or not. It's simply worth too much money to make the unethical choice, so people who are willing to do so are (on average) the ones who move up the most quickly.
This thought brought to you by seeing another discussion among folks who are looking for an ethical employer, the second one I've seen this year where no one could really suggest a company (in the first discussion, one person did suggest Mozilla, which I think is reasonable, but I've heard enough negative stories about how Mozilla is run from ex-Mozillians and only know one person who's happy there, which would make me very hesitant to consider working there unless I was under the manager of the one happy person I know).
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Stripe & Ethereum became magnets for talent by offering smart people the opportunity to build better infrastructure for the internet. The best people have left Google & Facebook a long time ago.
