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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?"
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.
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.