If you think about it, the very line that the smartest minds of our generation are working on making people click on things is itself marketing designed by marketers to sell the prestige/status of working for a big advertising company.
That actually is genius in its own way... but just as the quants in finance during the early booms were "the smartest guys in the room, until they weren't and you realised they all were poor implementers of undergraduate statistics and jargon during economic bubble and crash", I don't think the workers for facebook/Google are necessarily that bright.
It's depressing that our economic and social system is geared towards pushing maximum consumption, no argument there, but the smartest people on the planet already self selected out of that over the last 20 years, and what you're left with is... well... marketers and advertising dressed up as prestigious tech firms talking about how great they are.
> smartest minds of our generation are working on making
Considering the deterioration in software functionality that i m experiencing the past years across the board (from superheavy web apps to mobile apps that for no reason remove features to desktop apps that function worse than even mobile apps) - i m not even sure they re employing the " smartest minds of our generation"
In my experience the smartest people don't want to work on UI's, which is probably the reason they are bad. The smartest go work on other parts of the stack, doing things like machine learning or infrastructure.
The only place where you have the smartest people making UI's are in games, they often have very impressive performance and functionality. But even in games people hate making UI's, it is just that in games people care about the product so they bite the bullet and do it themselves.
Note that I am not saying that UI is easy or unimportant, making UI's is both hard and super important which is why it is a huge problem that we can't find good people for it.
That actually is genius in its own way... but just as the quants in finance during the early booms were "the smartest guys in the room, until they weren't and you realised they all were poor implementers of undergraduate statistics and jargon during economic bubble and crash", I don't think the workers for facebook/Google are necessarily that bright.
It's depressing that our economic and social system is geared towards pushing maximum consumption, no argument there, but the smartest people on the planet already self selected out of that over the last 20 years, and what you're left with is... well... marketers and advertising dressed up as prestigious tech firms talking about how great they are.