I'm sorry. My comment was supposed to be funny, but it was just rude. Thanks for calling me on that. <:\
All kinds of software can be shitty or non-shitty. I appreciate the call-to-action to developers stuck in the "trenches" of corporate software development. The "C++ coding mines", as one co-worker put it. I just feel the world is inundated with advertising and I hope inspired hackers have the opportunity to solve problems that help people more than businesses.
As FAKEGRIMLOCK says: "FIND CONTENT USERS WANT TO PAY FOR. ADS JUST WAY TO GO BANKRUPT SLOWER."
Advertising is only one or two steps above TPS middleware.
What's your problem with middleware? Building middleware gets you closer to doing systems level programming that a lot of things.. you get to deal with challenging problems in data storage and retrieval, concurrency, networking, filesystems, etc. when you're building infrastructure code. And middleware is used to build solutions to massively complex and challenging business problems that have a real impact on how people do their jobs and how companies run.
Personally, I'd rate working on a cool middleware platform (preferably something Open Source) as one of the best gigs you could have as a developer.
(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that builds Open Source software that would probably be lumped into the "middleware" category.)
Existing advertising solutions are, but it's a business that most good developers/designers/product people don't want to touch, so it continues to be shitty. I've been following Adzerk for a little while and wish my workplace could try them out, but I don't get to make those decisions. Still, I've long thought writing a non-shitty ad server is sort-of noble and interesting, so I'm hoping they continue to be successful.
Advertising is a mess and most of it is terrible and the problematic mindsets that have made it that way are pervasive... but what I see there is a ton of hard problems and it will be smart, entrepreneurial people that attack those problems.
