17 March 2016
Ad tech companies live in a world where there is no such thing as complete honesty. If there was ever a place where the nice guys finish last it would be ad tech. The companies that bring value are the ones living in the grey area, where they dip their toes to the dark side when required but try their best to remain in the light. Apart from the shady business and morality of ads on the internet there is the technology side to ad tech which really needs to be talked about, atleast briefly.
Engineering in the ad tech industry comes with many set of problems. Starting from legacy techonlogy, partners who are technically challenged, to the huge scale and speed everything needs to be done. It’s one of the few industries where the speed of light actually comes in to factor. Also it’s a business that never stops running. Money is being spent 24/7, 365 days a week. You end up dealing with huge amounts of data (billions of users), huge number of requests per second(hundred thousand+) and very short time limits to respond(milliseconds). Mixed with complicated logic to avoid fraud, business logic to spend money in the correct places, and eventually making sure you are able to report everything. Every monitoring solution, or metric to track causes a loss in performance. Eventually it all comes down to having the correct balance of reporting, monitoring and correctness.
Working in the industry has taught me a lot and dealing with these challenging problems has been annoying yet extremely enjoyable. I might not miss the all nighters and annoying pager duty calls, but I’ll surely miss trying to find solutions to the tough engineering problems faced in the Ad Tech industry.