1) Eliminate the word career from your vocabulary. It's something invented by beaurocrats as a rationalization for being timid.

2) Ask your self "can I identify with this product?" Or, more importantly, are you OK with other people making the connection that you are about "Y"? Can you say: I am X and I built Y" with a resounding sense of pride. Would you feel comfortable being introduced on CNBC as Mr. "Y". If the answer is not "Yes!" with an exlamation point, then don't take the job.

What you should never do, however, is base your life decisions on your opinions on what an investment banker might think.

That's not only a bad way to live, but also a bad way to run a business. Be your own compass!

As you work, you gain experience and skills that are more valuable. These skills are often specialized to some degree and support each other, tending to make you most valuable for certain kinds of work. As a result you will do a lot of that work. That's a career.

Whether you make a career out of starting tech companies or fixing pipe organs the word fits. In fact, you might start one career as a software developer and then decide to quit and run a nightclub instead. That'd be your career even if you technically had FU money and weren't doing it for anyone but yourself.

So, the question he is asking when he says "will a job in gay porn kill my career" is: will the skills and experience I have gained become worthless in other markets? Career is a flexible English word and takes on additional meaning easily. You can avoid it all you want, but that won't change the realities about how much his experience is worth to potential employers.

When I encounter the word career it's almost always paired with 'climbing that career ladder', with the implied 'toe that line as a dedicated corporate soldier or your career is finished'.

It's a sad state of affairs that those with over-simplistic attitudes and an ultra-conservative agenda have seemingly hijacked such a fine word. What to do if your self-described 'career path' doesn't sit well with the pointy-hair's idea of a proper 'career'?

I'm feeling that the word is tainted among the more thoughtful and enlightened and it's better to just not use it at all, lest one risk coming across as a Philistinistic simpleton.

The bottom line is that I was so embarrassed that I worked on this app that I don't list it in my online portfolio. On my CV, I just list a vague description of the duties I performed at that company without specific reference to the project.

If someone asks me about specifics, I will tell them about it - in fact, one interview I had asked me about the worst project I worked on and I talked about that one. So I don't hide it if asked.

I do wish that I had worked on something that I could be proud of for those six months though.

I guess that is the question you need to ask yourself. Is working on this something you can be proud of?

Don't worry what other people will think. Ask yourself how you will feel about it. If you have no problems with it, then go ahead.

Good porn sites have all the same technology problems that any other popular website does. There's not really anything you do on the tech side of a porn company that isn't directly applicable to any number of problems other companies face. If another company gives you a problem about working at a porn company, then you probably don't want to work there anyway.

And if anyone reading this ever sees me at a meetup or other event, I'll tell you a funny story about Kink's Wall of Pain. =)

That said, they have boring meetings and conflicts with their bosses and disputes over performance evaluations, just like any other workplace.

As for being a career-killer, I haven't heard of anyone feeling it was an albatross around their neck after they left. But they weren't applying to christiancoalition.com or foxnews.com in the first place.

I imagine many have far bigger technical challenges than most non-porn sites if you think about it. Huge bandwidth requirements, constant attempts to steal your product or otherwise compromise your systems and I'm guessing that porn sites see stolen or otherwise bogus credit cards far more often than any other business.

The envelope is now mostly being pushed by developments in search, social media and mining the web. The porn industry has moved on from pushing the tech envelope to being much more focussed on marketing and SEO.

It seems to open many more doors than it closes, as long as you don't become a "career porn guy".

In my opinion this statement is pure stupidity. If you can code and you are the best candidate then you should get the job. I have done extensive work in adult w/ some of the largest adult companies around and I can promise you that the technical challenges of a site that does that type of massive traffic are greater than or on par with what you will encounter at your typical job.

As long as you don't make or appear in porn you should be fine.

  As long as you don't make or appear 
  in porn you should be fine.

The only hardship you might experience from taking such a job is the ribbing you'd get from future potential employers, partners, investors and co-workers.

I personally used to work with a fellow years ago who worked for a server hardware vendor in the north east that had large companies(financial, aerospace) and government and military clients. He told me several stories where he went to non-descript massive underground data centers to do work that to this day he is not allowed to identify. On his resume, he too could only say the type of work he did and could not identify the clients due to NDA.

Gay dating is not porn, whether it's speeddating or not has little bearing on that. There are plenty of hetero dating sites that hook people up for casual sex, okcupid.com is one of those.

If gay dating is porn then hetero dating is porn as well, and I think we can all agree that okcupid.com is not a porn site.

Of course, okcupid.com also allows you to search for 'mr. or mrs. right', but that's besides the point, if the principle matters to you you have to ask yourself if you would work for okcupid or not.

If they are going out of their way to plaster pictures of naked guys and/or body parts all over their site then that's different, in that case it is a porn site.

But if all you're concerned about is the length of time people spend together than you have to wonder if you'd have a similar problem if the site was hetero sexual.

If the answer is 'yes' then don't do it, otherwise don't worry. In the end your reputation is yours and you have to be careful with it, if you put 'worked for gay porn site' in it that might not help, if you put 'worked for dating site' on it then there is no harm done.

In hetero porn, tons of the models or performers or whatever are said to be involved because they were sexually abused when younger. Doing porn requires a certain numbness and if the performer doesn't have that when she starts, she will. It's just a very sad situation. A lot of people, including me, would never get involved with it, and consider money made there to be tainted.

(I know nothing about whether the same is true for gay porn.)

A hookup site isn't like that. Although there might be "numb" people participating, they aren't being exploited / selling themselves so there's just a different feel. But you never know where your life might take you. Sometimes very uptight people are gatekeepers to something you really want. You shouldn't let that possibility control your life, but on the other hand you shouldn't give up those unknown future opportunities for nothing. This job would at least have to pay more to make up for that.

I upvoted you because your comment is interesting, but how do you justify the above statement other than "it's what some prejudiced people, including myself, think"?

Have you validated this by talking to people who work in the porn industry? Have you read some research that validated this?

I'm questioning it because it seems like a stereotypical and potentially bigoted belief and is very possibly wrong. People are different. Some people get off on having sex with their life partner. Some people get off on being surrounded by a bunch of guys jacking off. Som people get off on having sex with animals. Some people don't get off and they're ok with that. It's fairly plausible that some people get off on doing porn, and it makes sense that many of those would work in the porn industry.

I suspect this idea of 'porn stars were all raped' is a way to claim that porn isn't normal, it's a way to claim that only people with stunted and retarted sexualities do porn. That 'normal' people don't do porn cause it's 'unnatural' ("Look only mentally damaged people do it!"). I suspect that people propagate this idea because otherwise they'd have to look at themselves and say "I actually wouldn't like to work in the porn industry", much easier to claim that you're normal and healthy.

My experience (via a friend who works for one of the soft-core porn channels) is that this is generally not true.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/844pj/if_you_de...

Most startups, particularly in the tech sector, would be fine with this. However, larger companies' HR people might pass you up for this in the future, although never officially of course. Also, you run the risk of being labeled "that ____ guy" which can hurt your personal brand as well.

Bottom line: If your'e young and want to keep all your options open, I would stay away from it. If you don't mind the extra drama and think this is a really good company and opportunity, go for it.

Be proud of who you are!

Think of it this way, you're looking for Mr. Right Now in terms of your next position. And it just so happens that Mr. Right Now happens to be a gay dating site for men looking for Mr Right Now. I find the irony to be spectacularly hilarious.

Principles don't pay bills.

And keep in mind you probably wouldn't want to be acquired or take investment from a company that would look down on a gay dating site. Unless you mean you'd be looking to work for another startup and they may think twice about hiring you. In that case, that's probably not a company you want to work with.

So he says he regrets going the "porn" route because it wasn't ultimately profitable. But that's not really what you're asking. That, I have no anecdotes for.

He did just fine. Just be ready for the label to stick (it's been 20 years or more, and you tell the key word from the headline).

Of course, if you're asking this question it sort of indicates that the site is seedier than you're letting on or perhaps it is seedier than you want to admit. :)

Why? Because some people get bent out of shape at the thought of other people jerking off?

Is it also a problem to do work for a religious Web site? A pro-gay rights site? An anti-gay rights site?

There's always someone somewhere who's going to take issue with who you work for or what you do.

It's problem to the extent that just living your life as you chose and believing what you chose to believe are problems.

I.e., that's life.

So IMO, it really comes down to you. Would I do it? No, I don't really feel like photoshoping a bunch of male parts all day because our job roles would likely be different. And furthermore, it's not something I could showcase in a portfolio. If my head was buried in code all day and driven by analytics, that would be a slightly different story.

But if you start thinking about what you can and cannot do now because of what will happen to your career, it's just an excuse to keep on thinking what other people think of you. Career is a description, not a value by itself.

Thus, if you're fine with a gay dating site then the position is "your thing", and if you do things that are yours then, in the future, you'll end up finding new things that are yours too.

Sounds pretty nice compared to not taking a position you want but something else instead, and then later finding more work that you don't want because you set the early course to all that work that sounds nice but you didn't want to do.

If someone had a problem with me having a gay dating site on my resume, I wouldn't want to work there anyway.

The is always more then one job around. As for the adult stuff being career killer, I would have no problem hiring you if you could describe the hard problems you had to solve at that company. I would make sure the resume is filled with description of things like data mining, stats ...

Take the job then put it on your resume in bold :D At least that way any job offers you get will be from secure people who may actually be nice to be around.

It's hard to tell from your post how scuzzy the site you're talking about really is (based on your concerns, maybe it is worse than we think?), but unless it is a fairly transparent front for something illegal (prostitution or whatnot) I don't think you have a lot to be concerned about.

If the only thing that makes this more controversial than OKCupid or LavaLife or the personals section of Craigslist is that it is targeted at a gay audience, I definitely wouldn't worry about this. You probably wouldn't want to work for someone who is bothered by that difference anyway.

It sounds like you don't want to work in gay dating for the rest of your life. So why invest a chunk of your time getting to know the space?

As far as "HR girls" (how fifties of you...) I would expect them to avoid anything that would appear as though they are discriminating based on your sexual orientation, especially since the background check is normally only done on people already pegged as a hire.

Good luck on your job hunting.

It's fun, almost always very professional, and very progressive. Go for it! Have fun! Be passionate!

I worked at a porn site a little while ago, and it was remarkable how much traffic we had to deal with. I left because I wasn't comfortable with working at a porn site, among other things (and funnily enough, they never told me that their main product was a porn site when I was interviewing for the position.)

If I was a stereotypical blow hard though I definitely would have tossed his resume in the trash. There is zero apparent cost to eliminating a resume.

Based on your next potential employer, just make sure you remove the reference if you're applying to BYU or Bob Jones or something.

Not sure what you do, but if you're directly involved in tech, I'm sure it comes with lots of interesting challenges. It's a popular sentiment that the adult industry is the innovative force behind the web.

Do you have a moral obligation to working for this company? Does this company's mission fit into your moral outlook as a human being right now?

Simply not true. You can't believe everything you see or read on the interwebs, you know?

I'm glad you didn't deny the fact that she made porn :P