Well, I didn’t pursue a position at Intel because of what they did to Randal L. Schwartz. I was a sysadmin for a dot com in the beauty care field, though I had qualms about working for that industry (I think it hurts a lot more people than sex work of various sorts does).
There is the snicker factor of course. It wouldn’t bother me.
I hired a guy that used to work in the adult industry, and he was one of the best employees I ever had.
What I really want to know, though, is who goes to work for the RIAA or the MPAA?
Once built a online strip club for a group of gentlemen. All my friends wanted to come to my place of employment. I never got treated any different. Most people thought it was cool and had lots of questions. I have since moved on to more corporate endeavors, but I miss that environment!
Obviously this is a morality discussion and because of that it skirts in and out of the variable gray areas for most people.
Some people don’t give two shits about adult content or working in the adult industry. Hell people perform the stuff so obviously no line is uncrossable.
It all comes down to personal preference I’d say. I work doing programming in the Internet marketing arena, which for some people is pretty objectionable stuff. I see it as no worse than just about any other aspect of marketing or sales, that is to say it’s unpalatable in some respects, but a necessary function of our economy. I get to work on different platforms and solve different problems revolving around serving content and building internal tools to service our business. If you looked at my resume from this job it would look pretty impressive.
Overall I’d not want to work for someone if they were so high handed as to judge me based on some ill defined moral code of their own rather than on what I’ve done technically.
Your question about asking if the developer is still working at the site if he is now in his 30s is a good one – the folks I have known who chose to do programming in the adult industry have all been very young (late teens, early 20s)
For me, it’s not just an abstract moral issue, I would not work in the adult industry for the same reason I would not work for a gambling website – they both make money from exploiting primal instincts and both foster addictions, and with the adult industry there is (whether you want to deny it or not) a whole lot of real exploitation of women going on. Porn and gambling are both bad for society and really do destroy lives, and as you grow older you meet people and experience this firsthand.
There may be a place for both porn and gambling in the world, and the effects would still be there without the technology, but I, at least, choose not to put my energy and time into them.
I used to associate IMVU with creepy ads too, but then I started reading a good startup blog by Eric Ries called Lessons Learned. I was surprised after reading a few posts that Ries is the co-founder and former CTO of IMVU. His blog posts on software startups often contain examples learned from IMVU. He’s as much into passing on the knowledge as you or Joel. I don’t know anything about his software products, but I recommend his software business blog.
Well, I can’t see why it would be perfectly OK to talk about one’s job in DoD related industry, or finance, or pharma and yet having a technical position in the porn industry would make you a total pariah. By comparing the victim count of these different industries, porn seems to be the more humane, by far.
I had the chance to work at a tobacco manufacurer once and turned it down. I think I would rather work in porn than cigarettes.
Of course, there are probably plenty of people, a few of them programmers, who would KILL to work in the adult industry.
I personally would have a problem accepting a job in the adult industry. But (as other readers said) working in those industries should not be a license for others to shun you.
If you are judging someone based on their chosen field, not their technical chops, you ought to rethink what you are judging.
My dream job would be to work in the adult industry! My fiance wouldn’t have a problem with it either.
hmmmmmmm pron industry or sub-prime credit lender…
feels like predatory practices somewhere…
Wow. Just wow. You said IMVU’s awesome development and deployment wasn’t cool because they made a chat game. Everyone pointed out how dumb you were being and now you’re trying to slime them and call them porn?
That’s really not cool. These are the same kind of cheesy ads that Carl’s Jr. run to sell burgers, that Proctor and Gamble run to sell shampoo. If you want to write about the pornification of american culture and the awful, exploitative advertisements, do that. But when you try to salvage your wounded pride with intellectually dishonest sleaze, you only make yourself look bad.
You say least common denominator interests as if giving the customers what they want is a bad thing.
I once worked for a company that asked me during the interview if I had objections to working on adult sites. I replied that I would prefer not to. It turns out that an working on an adult site would have been preferable to some of the other crap projects we did.
There’s nothing more demoralizing than working for three months under intense pressure to have the project dead in the water on delivery because of management’s mismanagement.
Oddly enough, I’d take a porn job, if it was a legitimate and responsible site (there are some, I’m told). I have turned down an opportunity to work for a cigarette manufacturer. Someone wants to commit suicide, fine, but I’m not going to help them do it.
In 1998 I was fortunate enough to hear Dan Klein speak at the LISA conference about the challenges of being a sysadmin for a porn site. Beyond the legal issues, Dan talked about some very interesting technical problems regarding bandwidth, security, and payment processing. The most fascinating aspect was detecting and defending against FTP ‘bounce’ attacks to ‘game’ ad clickthroughs in their affiliate program. Remember, this was back when there were still legitimate anonymous FTP servers that allowed file upload.
At the time I didn’t know Dan’s history consulting (http://www.klein.com/dvk/consulting.html) or training via
USENIX, SANS, etc., but after his standing-room-only presentation before ~1000 sysadmins I was convinced this he had forgotten more systems administration than I’d probably ever know. Is Dan a perv? No idea - I don’t dig into people’s personal life if I can help it. I will say that he’s a very funny, very smart, and very talented person and I’m proud to consider him a peer in the sysadmin community.
It’s unfortunate and sad that the Puritans had such lasting and destructive influence on America. Would I list an ‘adult’ job on my resume? Sure, though not as such - I worked for the search engine/portal Excite.com for five years and we hosted over a terabyte (huge and expensive amount of EMC storage at the time) of our users uploaded (awful and often copyrighted) pr0n. So while not officially being a smut purveyor, we effectively were one, as was Yahoo! and
everyone else in that market space at the time. Nobody’s hands are clean, pardon the pun, so it’s not worth worrying about. If you list it on your resume and someone objects, you probably don’t want to work for them anyway.
I looked into starting some porn sites in the late 90s, right before the dot-com crash, because I read something about how the only businesses making money online were porn sites. I told my friends, logically, we should make porn. They really misinterpreted what I was saying and it freaked a lot of them out. Then all the phony businesses they were working for went under and they went on unemployment. Meanwhile, I, with my cynical strategies, was working for a bank, and was literally the only person I knew who still had a job.
Anyway, around 2005 I went back to the whole porn thing, but from another angle. My initial idea for a porn site had been based on reinterpreting erotic temple sculptures from India. Porn is very prosaic, this stuff was about sex and magic. Porn is like, sex and money. Not a great combination. But the demand for porn is huge and I figured it was so huge that a market for spiritual psychedelic porn existed. This was years before that XKCD comic about the same general principle. Rule 38 or 34 or whatever. So I had come up with this planned aesthetic and I was really attached to the art I had envisioned at that time.
So although I had abandoned the business idea I created some porn by remixing random Internet porn, adding video FX and doing extensive re-edits in Adobe After Effects. I think clicking my name should link directly to a blog post I made about this when I rediscovered the video files. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to compress so it’s huge. It’ll take forever to download. But I think it’s worth it. Happy wanking, or whatever. (I don’t know what you say in a situation like this.) It’s called acid porn.
I got the idea because I was taking shrooms with my girlfriend and we were watching porn and it was just too fucking weird so we had to turn the porn off. Shrooms bring out the weirdness in anything, and porn has LOTS of weird inside it. Creepy weird, nasty weird, all kinds of bad weird. I wanted some porn that was suitable for shrooms in the company of a female. Most available porn does not fit that description.
I have a porn experiment I’ve been wanting to try, but I don’t think I’ll ever find the time. I don’t even know if it’s possible any more. There used to be a subset of the porn industry which basically just created link galleries for affiliate programs with still images. It was all about creating web sites, linking them to each other, and generating traffic. What seemed interesting about it to me was that a lot of it seemed to be something you could automate. I thought it would be really interesting to build a system which built porn sites for you automatically, and all you did was collect the cash it earned for you. I spent a lot of time researching this but forgot all about it after a while.
I never really considered working for anyone in the adult industry, except once, and I didn’t go for it because A) I heard rumors the company was connected to the Mafia and B) talking to them on the phone, they seemed like weird, unhealthy people. Judgemental, maybe, but I’ve read enough about this to know that in that industry there are totally normal, chill people, and then there are also criminals and extremely abusive and/or self-destructive people. That’s what made me skittish, and no doubt where the stigma comes from. The legitimate half of the stigma, at least. The other half is just sexual repression and doesn’t matter.
The ultimate value of the work isn’t in the porn. As Scott McCloud pointed out, there are 2 directions to take an art: to advance the subject, or to advance the medium. If you’re writing software for erotic websites, and you brag about the latest technologies and the scaling issues, then you’re doing it to advance the medium (software), not the subject (erotica).
There’s nothing wrong with that. Not everybody has to do both: Charles Schultz is known for his art, but not because he could draw a more accurate human form.
What if you found out that Knuth (or somebody like him) learned everything he knew about algorithms from writing server software for penthouse.com? Would you think any less of his contributions to computer science?
Finally, remember that the vast majority of people never reach the point where they’re making contributions to the subject or medium (5 and 6 on McCloud’s scale) at all. At least this erotica software ships! The average result of a software project in the world is still aborted before launch; it’s hard to argue that an aborted project has more value than one that people want. Or look at all the successful but useless enterprisey software; your erotica programmer knows how to build something people want to pay for, which is more than can be said for most of these programmers.
What about betting industries?
I had the chance to work for that, and after the interview, where I saw how they do their business, I consider the MOST IMMORAL business!
They exist only to take your money, nothing else!
I refused politely, even though the salary was good and the technical side very interesting.