This post is just a rant, so if you’re looking for something insightful, I suggest you look elsewhere.
You know that phenomenon in which you look at a chair on some website and then it haunts you for weeks?
Worse yet, when you buy some random item you clearly need only one of, like a vacuum cleaner, and then are served ads for similar vacuums on every website you visit.
This is a universal experience.
What is not universal is the strange ads for software engineering jobs (or, stranger, bootcamps) that I encounter scattered across the internet like the worst seasoning. They take the form of dark-background rectangles with text formatted to look like code, sometimes something like:
while(living):
code()As if software engineers do nothing but program. As if writing code is what makes software engineering interesting!
Those could almost be funny if they bothered to be a bit more clever. The very worst are little snippets of what purports to be actual code, usually broken in a subtle (or, more often, not at all subtle) way. These ads ask “Can you solve this? If so, we want to hire you!“
These seem perfectly designed to stroke the ego of the sort of new software engineers who lurk on /r/programmerhumor, laughing that they almost get all the jokes. I can mock these people because I once was one. Believe me, advertisements like this do little to entice actual engineers.
Algorithms, if you’re reading this, here’s a head’s up for you: I am always in the mood to buy more books
I’m also offended, though, that the ad algorithms have me pegged so neatly. Facebook thinks I’m a sports fan when that could not be further from the truth, and Instagram keeps trying to sell me jewelry that I know I’ll never click on, let alone wear, but somehow everyone knows I’m a software engineer. Maybe it’s because I downloaded VSCode.
None of them ever advertise books to me, or writer’s workshops! Now those are links I might click on. Algorithms, if you’re reading this, here’s a head’s up for you: I am always in the mood to buy more books. I’m notorious for not wanting to spend money on anything, but if that thing happens to be a bunch of pieces of paper bound within cardboard and bearing a story, my stinginess evaporates.
It’s truly a dire sign that the best engineers at our Silicon Valley megacorporations cannot figure this out about me.