I'm pretty sure we've (or was it on reddit?) had this discussion before. Porn sites have to deal with extremely high traffic, must have great performance, have to constantly change to compete in a cutthroat industry, and you are working for people who really know the cost of downtime.

I personally think it's one of the most difficult types of sites to tackle as a developer, and takes a great deal of experience and responsibility.

I worked at AmateurMatch for almost 2 years and when you go from working on small local business websites that barely get 20 uniques a month to 2 million/month you learn how to scale your code _fast_.

It's not the greatest industry to work in, and can be a little sweatshoppy, but it's a decent stepping stone for bigger and better things.

Nope it wasn't me but I did restate in a comment below that it's mostly a personal belief. I definitely appreciate the engineering required to scale YouPorn/RedTube services.

My background is in design, which in this regard is a little different than what goes on behind the scenes to deliver [insert ambiguous video content here]. Porn is graphic, and masking around man's lower thunder is not something most people want to do unless they have to. That was the point of my desperation comment from a straight-male's perspective.

Porn is not the kiss of death or the end of a career or something that businesses don't want to see. Okay, sure there are some that will not want to hire me in the future but if they're that prudish (or based in Utah) or care that much about what my previous companies did then I doubt it would be a great match in the first place.

I head up the development group for one of the larger set of adult sites on the web and my LinkedIn profile shows explicitly who my employer is. Before I forgot to turn off "Looking for new opportunities" I was contacted by a couple of top 20 traffic sites and one very large consumer device company about management opportunities there. They cited specific details in my current position as to why they were contacting me.

As some others have said in their posts before we deal with extremely high traffic, low latency sites, we tend to have a lot of integration behind the scenes, we work with extensive traffic affiliation programs and we know exactly how much our downtime costs. We also probably pay more attention to web analytics than most shops do as well.

It tends to be a bit more chaotic that most of my other jobs but I figure it's preparing me quite well for the future and my next employer will reap the benefits of this experience.

I've been a designer in adult for 10+ years now and your correct about not being able to use your work portfolio for mainstream clients. However it's not as bad as it might seem, most of the designers I know in the industry run sites or design plenty of other things than can be used in their portfolios, if they ever do decide to switch jobs. I've interviewed hundreds of people and rarely do I ever care about their previous companies, all I want to see is how well they can design, not who they designed for.

Granted I also wouldn't want to work for a company that would be biased against a designer who did adult work, so for me personally, it makes sense. If you have hesitations, I would fully recommend passing on working in adult.

I wonder if it's different working as a designer vs. working as a developer. Porn sites are kinda known for sometimes having shoddy design. Also working on the graphics side of things it's a lot more directly related to the porn. On the flip side, developing perl for a porn video site probably isn't that much different than developing for youtube or vimeo in terms of technology.

In what way is it desperate? Most of us aren't working on very noble projects.

Ha! that hit the sport for me. Good point.

"""We operate one of the most visited Catalyst/DBIC sites in the world with 90 million users and hundreds of millions of pageviews per day"""

I would say this is quite good to have in ANY portofolio. And, if somebody disregards anybody with this experience only because it was a pr0n site... well, worse for them.

i agree that having porn work on your resume can be the kiss of death. as long as i need the help of the straight world to get ahead, i won't go near it.

but. "desperate?" no, i don't agree with that. saying that working for a porn company is an act of desperation is part of a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps porn ghetto-ized.

Fair enough and it's mostly a personal feeling as I definitely hold no judgement over people that want to work in the industry. YouPorn is obviously an impressive engineering feat, no doubt about it, and very legit service. :)

Interesting tid-bit I learned from friends that have worked in the industry: supposedly most industry execs are in fact women running the show.

I haven't seen that many women execs at the trade shows to be honest. I know there are a lot of producers that are women and many of the agents for the performers are women / former performers but most of the web companies seem to still have mostly men running the companies. I am not surprised since there is more "tech" or computers/software involved and that is still largely a male dominated field. That being said, there are a lot more women than one would expect working in the industry. And by that I mean, not in front of the camera.

You are not required to add every past experience in your portfolio as far as I know.