Slashdot Mirror
Will Working For Porn Website Ruin an IT Career?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I used to work for one of those big web services firms, but it went bankrupt, and now i've been looking everywhere for a semi decent PHP programming job. I recently got an offer from a local porn site to do all of the programming for their site, including creating a whole automated publishing system for them in PHP. I also got an offer to manage the NT Servers at a medical office. Now, if I work for a porn site, will I ever be able to work for a traditional website again? Will this be a black mark on my resume? Has anyone here ever worked in the adult area of the internet? As mainstream, regular sites keep cutting staff, will more and more of us have to work for the seedier side of the internet?"
Ignoring the question of whether the submitter was asking a real question or just advertising.... I once interviewed someone who was working at a porn site. Some notes:
* The site seemed somewhat reputable, which was a bonus, or at least not a minus. (I wouldn't hire anybody that seemed not to worry about working for an exploitive, illegal, or otherwise "over-the-line" site.)
* He didn't highlight the fact that he'd been working for a porn site, but didn't disguise it at all, i.e. visiting the corporate site listed on his resume made it clear what he'd been doing.
* The basic fact that he worked for a porn site didn't bother me particularly, though my boss had some (moral) concerns.
* I think that, regardless of the above point, if he'd had the skillset that matched the position he wanted, we would have hired him. It could be that working in a "backwater" of the industry gave him an inflated perception of his skillset....
Your milage may vary, of course.
Especially if you live in the bible belt. Good luck finding a manager who won't be wrestling with moral issues... and that is if you are darn good. It can close quite a number of doors to you (simply because of what the manager perceives / believes) and only opens up a limited number of doors (other porn sites).
But if you're hard pressed, and nowhere else to go, by all means, do what you have to do to live, as long as it is legal.
Personally, I've always been of the opinion that from a technology perspective, the porn websites have been out in front of the rest of the industry (mostly out of necessity). So, I would consider it comparable to, if not possibly better than, other industry experience when evaluating a prospect. Plus, how often as a manager to you get the opportunity to look at porn as part of your job? *grin*
But, I'm not everybody. I tend to hire people (and I've hired four in the past year) based on qualifications, and qualifications alone (although being able to communicate clearly does count as a qualification, so to some extent personality is a factor). Other people and/or organizations might have a problem with it; I would expect that a fair number of the companies, managers, and clients I've done work for over the past several years would, in fact. So, evaluate it like you would evaluate any other position. After all, the flip side is that by some people (hippies, for example), working for a DoD vendor like General Dynamics or Raytheon might be considered a black mark as well. Bottom line is, YMMV. The better question to ask yourself is what kinds of companies you'd like to work for in the future; if your answer consists mainly of the buttoned-down, straight and narrow, you probably should pass, but if it's more of the freewheeling, fast and loose sort, you may want to give the site a whirl.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Resumes are dynamic, not static documents. You should always produce custom resumes for every job you are trying to land instead of the same piece of one-size-fits-all document. Sometimes listing a porn tech job is absolutely the right thing to do like if you are applying for something that requires tech heavy skills. The same things goes for a non-porn job. If you are applying to work for the Moral Majority, you wouldn't list it. An non-tech example would be *NOT* listing on a resume that you were the CEO of a Fortune 500 when you are applying to be a secretary.
Good porn sites frequently use some of the most sophisticated web technologies around. Someone having been a geek at a porn site wouldn't prevent me from hiring them. Someone having worked for a site that provided poor customer service, failed to pay its bills or generally was disreputable would keep me from hiring them. These are not the same thing.
Does anybody recall that opinionated cam-girl Malice, of beautydestroyed.com (currently offline)? She lost her dotcom job when her employers discovered her web site and she refused their demand to shut it down. I suspect they were less bothered by her erotic pictures and stories (pretty sporadic and low key in any case) than her anti-religion and nuke-the-world rants.
Illegal firing, you say? Probably. Problem is, lawsuits are expensive, time-consuming, and not, on average, profitable.
Bottom line. There's a lot of social prejudice out there. And most kinds of prejudice are perfectly legal. For that matter, even victims of illegal discrimination rarely have much recourse. I can't offer hard numbers, but there are surely a lot of people out there that will simply ignore a resume that mentions porn.
Two summers ago, I worked at a company that made dynamic webpages for real estate companies. Before I left, they asked me to help interview people to help replace me. Of all the people whom we interviewed, the person who seemed to suit job best happend to have previously worked for a porn site.
Myself and all the other programmers recommended him, because he simply was the best. The managers themselves admitted that many porn sites probably are more technically advanced than the stuff we were doing, and that he probably was very skilled, but they felt that they didn't want someone like that representing their company and interacting with clients.
They hired someone else, less skilled and less fit for the job over it.
Seems a bit dodgy to me this posting, an advert perhaps? if you follow the link to the site you see they post in their news that "one of them [techies[ must have written to slashdot because lo and behold, there is a story on there that mentions us." Sounds all very innocent and true..
But right below is a news story which says, "Go to some of your favorite sites that have links to other sites. Write them and ask them to link to suicidegirls.com. Send me a list of all the sites you got to link to us. On Firday at 12:00pm PST I'll check those sites in my log of refferal traffic and the 5 people who sent us the most traffic will get a piece of SG gear of their choice in the mail."
Sounds like this is just what that user did, which makes the enquiry look far from genuine and moe like a sad attempt to win some porn site's ts-hirts...;)