9-30-2025
From Ad Chaos to Clarity
Sara is a news editor at a broadcasting company. One day, she receives a complaint: a reader has spotted malicious ads on the homepage. Sara reaches out to the engineering team, hoping for a simple fix.
The engineers explain, politely and with a hint of fatigue, that the ads are served by a third-party provider. They have no control over what appears. This is not Sara’s first trip to the engineering desk this month.
Bob, a junior developer, overhears the conversation. He's new to the team and slower than some of his colleagues, still learning the norms practiced by the more seasoned and perpetually overworked developers. At home, Bob’s troubleshooting strategy usually involves calling tech support. So, almost reflexively, he picks up the phone.
The first customer service representative transfers him. The second offers a bit more clarity. The ads on the homepage, it turns out, are selected from pools curated by third-party providers. The ad network doesn’t serve the ads directly; it simply indexes those pools. While they can’t block specific ads, they can block entire providers.
That’s all Bob needs. He sets a goal: identify the providers responsible for the malicious ads. It isn’t an especially elegant solution, but it’s concrete. And as any engineer knows, the first step in solving a problem is defining what you're actually trying to solve.
Within minutes, the team has crowdsourced a tool: a simple browser extension. Editors can click the extension, then click the offending ad. The tool saves a screenshot, but more importantly, it captures the name of the ad provider.
Sara is trained on how to use it and quickly spreads the knowledge across the department. Each week, a list of bad providers is compiled and sent to the ad network. The engineering team, finally, gets its time back.
Sara stops bringing ad complaints. Trust begins to build between departments. Sara and Bob start sharing updates informally. Communication improves.
Time passes. Bob remains at the company. The original engineers who wrote most of the codebase eventually leave, taking all the documentation with them. Bob and the remaining team members are forced to dig through the code to understand how things work. Requests keep arriving.
As the workload grows, the team begins to lose something essential—the energy required to stay curious, to imagine alternate solutions, to build bridges across departments. Experience still matters, but so does innovation. So does the ability to care.
Eventually, a new hire joins...
Keeping employees happy, it turns out, isn’t just good for morale. It’s good for the work.