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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?"
The better question would be, would I ever want to work for mainstream companies again!
Ok, here's what I would do. See if they'll use you as a contractor. Doing so has certain monetary and philosophical advantages that should lessen the stigma in the eyes of future employers. If you can concurrently get another client or two then you will be in an even better position.
You're obviously sensitive to what other people will think and how it will affect your career. But, maybe, the best idea is to consider it on a moral basis, for yourself... take everything else out of the equation for a moment.
Take the "Mom test." (Would you be ok with telling your mom what you do? Where you work?)
I don't know that it will directly affect whether or not you would be hired by a future employer, but it may indirectly affect your chances (either good or bad), particularly if a future employer (or manager) is for/against those sorts of things.
Lets look at resume-type questions: Would you be going in as an employee or contractor? What is the official name of the company (suicidegirls.com or "Digital Entertainment Network" for instance)? What work will you specifically perform?
In all seriousness, if you're a contractor working for another company, you may be able to get away with only naming you contract company and some general terms of your employment (eg "manage 50,000 user accounts using PHP and MySQL" rather than "manage 50,000 adult memberships").
I don't think most employers would necessarily look at it as a black mark, but people are people, especially when it comes to those management types, and sometimes obvious "flags" on your resume like that might have a impact.
If this had been a front page story, methinks Anonymous Coward might be retiring by now.
What kind of fringe benefits are they offering?
translates to BANDWIDTH to me. There's a reason a lot of hosting services won't carry porn, and not necessarily the obvious one.
I'd think that future employer that deals with high-bandwidth, load-balancing applications, would want someone with technical experience in that area.
Then again, I wouldn't put PORN in large print on my resume -- stress the tech.
You could've hired me.
I have to wonder about this question, IMHO either its a plug for the pr0n site or this person is not too smart. If you were about to take a job at a company, would you really want to advertise the fact that this company is looking for PHP programmers, on a site (/.) that has a lot of people that know PHP reading it. Furthermore, this could also be a clever scheme to try and find PHP programmers for the site, either way, its very suspicious to me that the URL is actually in the question..
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I would like to advertise my business on Slashdot. I realize that the banner ad business is in freefall, but I would like to look into article-based advertising solutions.
What sorts of rate plans are available? How much does a personal endorsement by CmdrTaco cost?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
...try having the fact that you were once the owner of one on your resume...
Actually I cover it up well, siting the things I did for the company, and the fact that we had a name that didn't sound like a porn company from the name...thats what I would stress in this situation do they have a "doing business as" name that would be more acceptable on a resume? No one says yuu have to provide URL's when you move on, and in fact in my case because the company failed I CAN'T....although once when one of the other partners went to an interview he gave his prespective employeer the URL...the results were funny...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
Having porn related work on your resume might help you avoid working for places run by uptight ninnies. That might not be a bad thing.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
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.
Erotic Computing Group - Mit Media Lab
http://ecg.media.mit.edu/
[smile]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"