> The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers.
This is an interesting thought. Working in a environment close to advertisement (travel recommendation engine), I have a few possible explanations on that.
- First, working in with a product that have no (or close to) added value for end users can be very bothering, and top engineers care about doing useful things.
- Second, to design a fast, simple and honest ad network you must fight your own business/marketing team (because they always want more data, higher click through rate, etc). Since they have most of the power here, they end up hiring more diligent engineers who won't argue about privacy, curated content and other stuff.
- Third, top engineers are working in ad companies, and secretly conspire to make the whole system collapse from the inside.
Ad companies are not typically considered "sexy". This is just an image problem because few industries drop you into such massive scale and engineering challenges from day 1. There is a lot of cool stuff to build.
It's not necessary to get computer science geniuses for this, and frankly I need people who get stuff done rather than trying to save the world through code. But the talent has been subpar because most of the companies outside of the top few (google, facebook, twitter) are smaller and not tech driven. They just pick up whoever can code up some simple server and get an ad on the page. Add in all the shady companies and it gets worse. Optimizing for the user just hasn't been a requirement.
We have a honest and fast ad network, probably the best you'll find. Quick, simple, static ads that are non-intrusive. And we actually perform quite well. It's not somehow at odds with the model, it's just harder... the question is, who's willing to work harder at this?
This is an interesting thought. Working in a environment close to advertisement (travel recommendation engine), I have a few possible explanations on that.
- First, working in with a product that have no (or close to) added value for end users can be very bothering, and top engineers care about doing useful things.
- Second, to design a fast, simple and honest ad network you must fight your own business/marketing team (because they always want more data, higher click through rate, etc). Since they have most of the power here, they end up hiring more diligent engineers who won't argue about privacy, curated content and other stuff.
- Third, top engineers are working in ad companies, and secretly conspire to make the whole system collapse from the inside.