As far as weapons go…are you a pacifist? I can respect that, even though I disagree with that. If not, and you are a US citizen, you presumably want the US Armed Forces to have weapons, and I see no reason to prefer inferior weapons to superior ones. Therefore, I would have no qualms about working on weapon systems, since they are unfortunately a necessity.
I did have qualms about being partly involved in mass emailings, and I’m glad I got out of there pretty fast. Weapons help people in a way (even if I’d prefer they didn’t), and spam doesn’t. Same with tobacco and scams (highbrow or lowbrow).
I suppose the moral is to not work on what you find objectionable, and avoid working for unethical people wherever you find them.
Many of my classmates at RPI went to work for defense contractors. I went to work for General Foods saying, They don’t drop Cool-Whip on kids. I worked there five years but when Phillip Morris bought GF I resolved not to work for a tobacco company and left as soon as I found a place to go. Porn bothers me a lot less than war or cancer.
@Marty: If you believe porn is wrong then you shouldn’t take the job or visit any porn sites, which I’m sure you don’t. But just because someone else doesn’t share your vision of the world doesn’t mean they have no values or don’t care about morals. They just don’t agree with you.
If you read the posts more carefully you’d realize people aren’t saying they’d do ‘bad things’ to make money, they’re saying they don’t believe these things are bad. Very big difference.
I personally find anyone who adheres to a strict doctrine of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ without ever evaluating their position or studying the issues, to be some of the most ignorant among us. Haven’t we learned from the past? How many of our cultural rules, which everyone once thought were ‘right,’ are now condemned as evil? ‘Women are inferior to men, people of a different race deserve no rights, etc. etc.’ If you’re not evaluating your opinions regularly, you’re on your way to becoming irrelevant and out-of-touch with the world - the old guy in the nursing home ranting about what a shame it is that all the kids are using ‘computers’ these days and it’s destroying our society.
I guess when the talk comes to web security issues I’d prefer to contract someone who has worked in the adult industry. Those sites are constantly hammered from people who try to bypass authentication.
When you consider the fact that the people that read this blog are some of the most intelligent, well-read and cultured people on the internet, and THEY disagree with you in the large, surely you must consider the possibility that your narrow minded viewpoint may not be the only correct or moral way to live in our society.
I’d think twice. Personally I don’t have against porn as such (I suppose a lot of those who said they wouldn’t work in that industry have viewed porn sometime), but the porn industry tends to do things I consider immoral. Spam, to start with.
I haven’t done any web development; I work on desktop apps. Maybe it is my unfamiliarity with the web development world that leads me to ask this, but:
What’s so great about 6 deploys an hour?
How broken would your website have to be that you’d be fixing it 6 times an hour? Having the capacity to respond so quickly sounds great, but if you actually find yourself [deploying] new code fifty times a day, that doesn’t strike me as a supreme feat of software engineering, it strikes me as Doing It Wrong. Like winning a contest to build the world’s heaviest airplane.
Sure I would still take the job listing mentioned above! I must say all people who have a problem with this need to grow up and need to become more open-minded about sex or pornography. We don’t live in the 18th century anymore!
People working in the industry are not any sleazier than those outside of it from what I’ve experienced. I found that the adult workplaces were less uptight than regular jobs and it was a welcome change. In general I would say that most people are hypocrites and that is the real problem here. One job I would never take is working for a SPAMMER.
Hey, no offense, but I think you’re being a prude.
Skip porn/adult/LCD-babes for a minute – push that on the stack, we’ll come back to it – what about games? Same thing, right? Game programmers are doing miraculous technical feats in the name of selling to the least common denominator to maximize profits.
And we lionize them!
Why is sex different? Hint: because you’ve got hangups about sex. Oh, you THINK you don’t -because you’re a modern, new-age, liberal-thinking kind of a guy – but something your parents/teachers/priests/whoever taught you when you were 6 yrs old has stuck with you, despite your best efforts to eradicate it from your system, and you’re a prude.
I don’t mean it as an insult; I’m one, too. I fight it, but it’s tough. That stuff we were taught when we were 6 is tenacious!
So you just have to look at this stuff on its technical merits, and then toss in a cavalier hey, and it’s fun, too, right? at the end. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!
It’s ok with me if you want to stigmatize adult programmers – but I think it’s odd that one would hold them in different regard to those who wrote, say, HAWX or whatever the latest cool game is… One rule that applies to all is how we fight bigotry!
I believe code has the power to change the world. Is your code changing the world for the better or for the worse?
Great principle, Jeff. Certainly one that can/should be extended to as much of what we do as people as possible. Anyone who is offended by that statement likely has a shortage of introspection.
I routinely mention to recruiters that I have a negative interest in working on any military technology. The top of my resume (when I’m looking for work) states that I want a job that adds to the creative or social welfare of people to some degree. It needs to fit the moral framework I possess.
Perhaps some people find porn or weapons of (fill-in-the-blank) to be something that changes the world for the better. If they honestly believe that, then I think that they are doing the correct thing for them. It just doesn’t fit into my ideals personally.
First, and almost certain, is that many porn sites use very shady business practices with their customers. They bill when they should not with the knowledge that many customers will be too embarrassed to contest the rip-off billings. And many of them porn sites are a major source of malware. Both of these practices amount to theft from the consumer.
I will stand up and admit that I have browsed a fair number of porn sites, and been billed by, ummm… several. With my full consent.
Not one has made the slightest effort to rip me off. Not one has billed me after my cancellation went through, or made it the least bit difficult to cancel. Not one has ever, to my knowledge, put any piece of malware on my computer.
I mean, think about that last bit… how in the world would it be good business to vandalize computers belonging to your customers or potential customers?
I think if you don’t have a moral problem working for a (respectable) porn company (I don’t, though I am a bit of a prude) there’s still the very real problem of the people around you. I can imagine that if you live around an area where you don’t feel you can tell people where you work you’d think twice about taking that job. In general, we do care what other people think about us and in some areas of the world working for a porn company can carry a real stigma.
Of course you have to draw the line somewhere, but you can draw it somewhere around financial companies and still have plenty of jobs you can get.
Sex. All your parents did it. Their parents, too. And so on. Now some people exercise to look better, get checked regularly to prevent being infected with STDs and do it with a few new tricks. Somebody films it, other people watch it, jerk off, feel good. I feel thankful for the gorgeous girls and guys presenting their hot bodies to the world. I think it’s really nice of them, because it makes me feel good.
Honestly, what is even remotely immoral about that? Please tell me, I really don’t know. And don’t come up with shady business practices, they exist in all businesses and are not an essential part of porn.
I had refused to freelance in suspicious (I’d not say illegal but I have had such feelings) projects when my job would be to manage the development and register am lot of bank accounts under my name.
