"It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ..."

So, how would you employ the engineers instead?

Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. The huge churn of capital and labor creates as it's byproducts from time to time items of actual human value.

But those things would be fragile and complicated without the industrial economy surrounding them. If we look at this stage in our species history from far away, currently the industrial economy is supposed to be predictable and mundane.

So, "producing useless crap" is a required feature of our economy so it can occasionally produce science, art, medicine and the other things that actually improve us as a species.

Now, consumer goods fall into two categories: physical and digital. Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment.

So, if we look at it this way, and presume that producing consumer crap is necessary for economic growth and stability, it's much better to work in producing digital goods and services rather than physical ones.

Within this framework, the actual question is not why do the brightest minds work at facebooks, but, will our economy ever develop beyond the point where producing useless crap is not so much a necessity for systemic stability rather than an occasional indulgence.

>>Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume.

As the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. So don’t be so judgmental. :)

No, it's garbage. Individuals living in industrial societies are consuming way more than the ecosystem can support. So, either we need to get rid of people or they need to consume less. I prefer the option where they consume less. If it's not needed for a wholesome life it's "crap".

I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.

> I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.

Maybe have some sympathy for others? If you feel so strongly and yet don't change your actions, I think it's pretty hypocritical to say other people are consuming a bunch of "crap". Don't get me wrong, there is a ton of waste produced in today's world and more of it than we need. But I think it's important to consider that many people struggle to make ends meet and can't afford the time, money or thinking that many of us here have.

Sorry, are we disagreeing on some point? Maybe I missed something.

We both agree that the western society consumes too much, and in the part of my comment which you extracted I included myself explicitly in the group of people who consume too much. I am having sympathy for people who consume too much and don't change their ways. I'm the first person I have sympathy for in this as I'm preoccupied by other stuff than my lifestyle choices at the moment.

I did not denigrate the people who consume too much, merely the habit of consumption.

The actor and the behavior are two different things. Merely behaving in a bad way does not make the person bad. It merely means they have something to improve in their personal conduct.

Calling stuff people consume "crap" is not the same thing as insulting people. Although, western commercialism has done a great effort in trying to tie persons self worth to their consumer habits.

This psychological link is also crap.

> Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment.

But often turns minds of droves of Humans to shit, and turns every moment of idle human thought into raw material....

I agree that Facebook provides digital value through its social media and messaging platforms, but Facebook’s business purpose is to sell things to consumers. I’d rather have engineers work in physical industries where they can improve goods and lower the waste produced, rather than simply sell more of less efficiently produced goods.

Plus unfortunately Musk is fairly well known for underpaying his staff. So you have to choose to take a paycut to switch from Google / Facebook. To be fair all of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft do at least sell actual products.

Perhaps this is why Google / Facebook open source so much of what they do, so that talented engineers don't just have to say 'I get paid to make people click'.

Underpaying what baseline?

A recently hired software engineer at Tesla, while not giving specific figures, said that the base comp was competitive and the options were $100k+ over the standard 4-year vesting schedule. I've heard similarly from a handful of others; I'd expect the comp to be inline at SpaceX.

Not to mention the growth potential for your stock options between SpaceX and Tesla may be higher than comparable companies.

This doesn't look good:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Sal...

> Underpaying what baseline?

Facebook / Google

well most companies "underpay" if baseline is FB and Google

A generation or two ago all the brightest minds in the world were working on ways to kill the most people as efficiently as possible.

This is progress.

That's because the only real monetization on the internet is advertising, and ecommerce (which relies heavily on advertising).

Pretty much every consumer website on the internet deals with one of those areas. If it becomes easier to movie money on the internet, we might start seeing new dominating players other than Google (ads), Facebook (ads) and Amazon (ecommerce).

It's not actually sad. Social media and advertising involve incredibly complex and vast search spaces. The problem domains are massive and solving the issues in those fields, like scaling software and hardware, enables us to build tooling and infrastructure that every field can use. So those businesses are the bootstrapper for other businesses. Example: SpaceX wouldn't exist if Paypal didn't exist first.

Just needs a little time. It wasn't that long ago when only a few people had Twitter and FB accounts. IG even took a while to gain main stream traction.