Most corporations are so scared of violating employment law that they never ask for specifics. The last two companies I worked at had a third-party verifier who simply confirmed (by pay stubs, calls, etc) my employment history. I assume they don't share anything else other than that I worked somewhere for the periods I stated on my resume.

The more difficult part is tolerating the passive-aggressive culture of "polite society" that exists at most "legitimate" companies. Porn company culture is very aggressive. At my current dull-corporation job it's almost a weekly occurrence where I want to tell my manager or someone else up the chain to fuck off and get out of my way, in regard to getting work done. Porn is the only industry I've worked in where an aggressive (tinged with a modicum of respect) attitude is rewarded. I hate the hypocrisy at large corporations who encourage "take initiative/leadership, get-it-done!" attitudes, but then push back when an employee actually does that.

Trading industry. Lots of profanity in trading. It sounds similar in many ways based on what you said. Very much results oriented and not PC.

Thanks for the reply! Finance (S&T) is what you want to be in, by the sounds of it.

Give it a couple years. You will be assimilated and singing a different tune :)

I didn't really have any issues. I even went to an educational company serving the K12 vertical in a leadership capacity. It helped I knew the VPE there through other past colleagues but after my interview with the VP of HR it went pretty well.

The funny part was how curious everyone was about what went on there. I never really felt that much stigma about it from others...most of it was actually self generated. The other way I got past the potential stigma, though, was that I discussed how serious the business side was. The analytics we did, how much detailed knowledge we had about what downtime cost us, etc. Our HR training was done by lawyers, not consultants, because if the company got sued they were not going to get a sympathetic jury so I knew what what not to do as a manager there. That was actually pretty attractive to the VP of HR at my next company.

I'm not saying you won't find those that pass on you because of having porn on your resume but I don't think it's that big of an issue. As others have noted before most porn companies do business under a pseudonym that is innocent sounding and it's usually enough to get you past the screening that might filter if it said "Bang Bros" or whatever company it was.

The bigger issue is if you had school aged kids. They'd never have let me talk at career day. :-)

After school field trip is where it's at. You'd be the most popular parent ever!

I built a few small adult sites early in my career when I was more a designer than a backend / ops guy.

When asked by a recruiter for more portfolio I said "Well, there are more, but they're adult". Her response was "Wow, I've always wondered about who does those and how that all works!"

and:

"That must be great, you'd have all the passwords!"

Mind you, this is in the more liberal Australia.

> Mind you, this is in the more liberal Australia.

My boss here in Brisbane keeps seriously considering getting into online adult services of some description. He also wants to build a weed dispensary web app, so we can launch the moment they legalise it!

I would leverage the fact that names like MindGeek sound innocent. I'd call it a content, distribution network for businesses that shares messages, images, and video. I'd point out our main advantages were massive capacity, responsiveness, and reliability. We pushed terabytes of data through our system world-wide for our customers. I did (activities here) to help make that happen. I'm happy to bring my skills to a new organization with new challenges that might benefit from similar capabilities.

Then cross-fingers hoping they find that description generic and boring enough that they don't Google it.

I worked for a big one years back, for several years (rev per year in the hundreds of millions). They had an innocuous alternative business name, that you could use for resumes. I think it may have been the parent company, while the porn-name was a subsidiary.. or something.

Either way, its turned out to be a total non-issue. I always used the innocuous name on my resume, but everybody generally already knew, and nobody cared. Seemed like most people I end up working with have worked there or have had a friend that did or hired someone that did at some point.

I was kind of surprised.

Nah, pretty easy. I actually deliberately put it on my resume to filter out companies that would probably be up tight about it.

Most coworkers at companies I have worked at know what I have done in the past. Never had an issue. You don't bring it up at the office and you use calibration and gradually give out details and judge whether coworkers would be cool about it when talking to them outside of work.

Funny you would say this. When I released from prison, I also put my criminal convictions on my resume to filter companies that would be uptight about them. I didn't want to waste time with interviews.

Turned out I only looked for 2 weeks before finding a good job.

I imagine it's more difficult for the actors themselves to transition out of the industry than it is for people in support roles to move on.