I also work as an engineer for an ad related company (openx) and I similarly believe we do none of the above. On the engineering side we mostly write code that gets called billions of times a day and has to provide responses in a few hundred milliseconds. It's kinda fun.

Google is definitely an advertising company, but they do it well.

I took CS-373 with Prof Erickson ten years ago. It was hard. But he was also possibly the best lecturer I had while in school.

I thought they did something similar three years ago, but it didn't get traction and they sunset it. It makes a lot of sense, maybe the market is ready for it now.

We're OpenX, located in Pasadena, CA.

We're willing to relocate, and the internship length is flexible. The internships are paid.

We wrote an ad server and have our own ad exchange. We also wrote our own time-series datastore (Erlang and C). Most of our code is Erlang, Java, and C. We're using Cassandra, Riak, CouchDB, Hadoop, and others.

We have datacenters in the US (east/west), EU, and Japan. We handle billions of requests a day, and get a couple hundred milliseconds on each one to determine which ad is the best one to serve. A typical request will hit eight backends in that time period. If that sounds fun, you can reach me at joel at openx . com.

Yes! As an 'old' programmer with a family, I thought long and hard before leaving a stable job and joining a startup. In the end I decided that it was worth it even if I had to find a new job in two years and ended up somewhere that just 'paid the bills'.

In my limited experience, it seems like finding a good startup job in LA depends a lot on your network - e.g. you worked with so-and-so here and they're doing something new and think of you, where my perception of SF/SV is that awesome startup jobs are so plentiful you can't help but have one.

If anyone from earbits happens to be reading - would you please provide an alternative to FB for login? I don't have an FB account and I won't get one just to sign up for your service. FWIW, I've paid for my music for the last ten years and currently subscribe to Pandora and Rdio. I'm in your target market, except for the FB thing.

Hey Joel, that is at the top of our list to add. Unfortunately, nearly all of our current features that require registration are designed for sharing on FB. Only bookmarking songs and getting email announcements about new features or artists will really be enabled by registering via email at this time. That being said, we're on it.

Cool, thanks for the response. I'm enjoying the service. Good luck.

Generally, I think: "Great, you implemented a feature and registered a domain for it."

I like what you said, and it mirrors my experience. It comes down to what your priorities are. In my case it's family, work, then other stuff. It's a lie to believe that you can have/do it all, but it's generally true that you can have/do the things that are really important to you. I don't ride motorcycles, fly RC airplanes, or play guitar much anymore, but I'm okay with that because they were lesser priorities than the top two.

Only 15 minutes for lunch with your girlfriend? I'll give you some feedback: if you'd like this relationship to last, she's going to need a little more time than that.

=)

hehe, that was just a sample :)

Have kids.

Surprisingly effective. Also encourages development of other positive character traits.