When I first moved to New York, I worked at a company that was an Ad Injection toolbar. I had no idea what the company did for six months.

They hired me to make them a website. I worked alongside an art director and a content creator. Everyday, the reoccurring question was, "what exactly do we do". I was disconnected from the sales staff and the marketing side, so I kept working on a basic WordPress site.

Six months in, we heard that the office was going to close. There was little to no warning, then a week later, we heard that the FCC raided the Florida home office for the CEO breaking tons of spam laws.

The overall structure of the company wasn't necessarily designed to keep people unaware of what they were doing. Instead, they had so many things that the company did, but most of the other "things" didnt make any money. When you boiled down the operations, you realized there was a small number of things that was hugely profitable (spam/toolbars), then a ton of other things that were nonsense and unprofitable.

Sounds like Adknowledge?

Microservices!

I went for an interview at a startup, where the very charismatic CEO explained how their wonderful product helped website owners optimise their content based on their user's profiles. He forgot to mention that those profiles were built using all sorts of illegal and TOS-breaking practices to build display ads for gambling sites. I only found this out by accident, months after the (failed) interview, when talking about them with somebody at a meetup.

So I guess it's possible if the business has a specific strategy for doing it.

These guys are _very_ good at selling, in other words, making something seem good and pure and beautiful. I ended up in an almost identical company doing identical tech. At first we were building an anti-spam platform for which the user would only see two ads a day from us, and none from anyone else. Seemed like a good trade off. Except we never got to the anti-spam bit -- just the ad bit. I was gone within 3 months of arriving.

It might have just been that particular company at that time, but I've never worked with so many morally questionable people at one company. Never again.

I got the impression he wasn't working directly on the ad injection software at all. He was working either on different software or in a different division of the company. It sounds like 5oonRed has a culture of not talking about the ad injection and that their internal jargon was designed to disguise it.

He wasn't shocked to find that he personally had been writing an ad injector. He was shocked to find that the company he was working for made such software without his realizing it and that it derived most of its revenue from said software.

>5oonRed

It's 50onRed, apparently. The article uses a font with Text Figures which makes '0's look like 'o's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures

Adtech in general is kind of difficult to grok at first. It's dense with jargon and is largely driven by partnerships and resale. To a newcomer the industry can be very opaque.

It's likely they weren't working on the actual ad injection itself, but rather the backend systems that select and count the ads. From that perspective it's just a matter of handling X requests per second, without it necessarily being clear where the traffic comes from.

When I worked at Adzerk, we'd be approached occasionally by companies doing this kind of garbage. They were always very good at disguising their actual traffic sources. Our sales team had to be very adept at asking the right questions to eliminate the shitty partners quickly.

Because you would only realize if you were actually writing the extensions, which only takes one or two person to do because all they do is inject a javascript file into each page.

You could be working on the auction side (where ads bid to be served to that particular user profile), or a bunch of other infrastructure stuff.

"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." - Jean Renoir

Right out of school I worked at a company that builds deep packet inspection hardware and it seems like a dream job: good pay, smart people, interesting problems, reasonable schedule. Too bad about the product though.

I don't really see a problem with working on something like that. There's a legitimate use for technologies like that. The problems are laws and social structures that allow those technologies to be abused. I don't fault the engineer who makes a better gun, but I might fault the marketing department that sells it in a market knowing it will be used for harm (don't be a war profiteer), or the the politicians that resist sane restrictions .

Because he was not. Maybe he was working on a backend, or on a UI, or on testing, or on automation, or sysdmin, or 100 of other places.

I find it difficult to understand how you would even interview & accept a job without understanding what the company did.

Once you learn that they are selling ads on websites, "what does the company do to earn money" seems to be sufficiently answered.

Also I would strongly suspect that most traders of stolen goods (ad spots, in this case) would have a path for legitimately acquired merchandise as well, not only for plausible deniability but also because they sure would not mind paying their bills in a clean way, they just failed to resist the lure of the extra cash. With that in place, you'd have to actually work in the shady part to know about it, or have bird's eye numbers of the whole company where you might see that output does not match the legitimate input.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair

I really think this quote is a bit unfair here. Especially in the startup scene, many companies have quite vague product descriptions. I've worked at a place where it took me 3 months to figure out what they were doing (nothing immoral BTW, just very complex/diverse products).

But for those three months you had no idea whether what they were doing was moral or not, and you didn't check.

A nice tech jobs in a cushy air-conditioned office that lets you feed your family: Jobs like these don't grow on trees.

I used to work for a residential Real Estate platform, as a network/server OS/hardware worker. I didn't realize I had been hired by email spammers until we got Spamhaus emails, and my job became getting us off the RBLs.

Years ago I worked at a place where I didn't know what the company did. I knew they made physical products (had a factory in the building) that had some sort of industrial use. However I didn't have the very specific domain knowledge to understand what those products did and my job didn't depend on it. My team was the only software team not writing firmware - we worked on the intranet. It didn't help that all conversations were filled with jargon.

I got the impression it's just super fun. We're doing ad syndication! We sell space on websites! We have an innovative peer disruption space sorting alorithm optimizer!

I have a colleague you might like to meet. Understanding anything is not his forté. He turns up, does what he is told, goes home, and is paid at then end of the month. Except maybe the "does what he is told" part, but that is a different story!

It's pretty easy to compartmentalize your staff. In fact, it's necessary, as it allows people to not feel "responsible" even when aware that they are doing something wrong. So one person makes the sales calls, and another ships the products, and another makes the products, and another does the billing, and they're all just executing SOPs and minding their own business...

I got the impression that the employees in the article were making ads. When you make ads you don't necessarily notice how exactly those ads get in front of users. When they say that the didn't know how the company made money, they probably meant that they thought it worked like other ad companies: paying websites for ad spots.

and how do you work fulltime for a company and not bother to figure out what they do?

I have a colleague you might like to meet. Understanding anything is not his forté. He turns up, does what he is told, goes home, and is paid at then end of the month. Except maybe the "does what he is told" part, but that is a completely different rant.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair

Good question. If they actually figured out a strategy to do this, it seems to me that it would be a maddening job. Oh look! A free lunch!