I’ll add that the content of the work, especially around the but not-limited-to the advertising business, can be soul-grinding on its own. As a young person it’s easy to buy into almost any business model, but when you find yourself an instrument of exploitation it can create cognitive dissonance and anxiety. Whether it’s deceiving users, getting them to spend more than they can afford, or creating a wake of environment damage, it’s hard to justify getting paid to do certain kinds of work, regardless of how much you’re “making the world a better place”. Getting paid extremely well to do it makes it feel somehow worse.
I'll second that. I was once hired as a "developer" in customer service for an old software product of a big company. My whole day consisted just of reading through log files. It didn't help that the company didn't invest anything in getting me familiar with the product. In the last months I sometimes got the feeling like my head was literally going to explode. Must have been panic attacks. I took a year off after that.
Yeah, getting people to click on ads is definitely not what I want to do with my life. At my most recent company, I remember when the ads team had run an A/B test that showed a pretty significant lift in the number of ads clicked. Guess what the change was? They just put more ads on the page. I was floored when I heard that.
