15 ms·

I worked for a porn company for 2 years. I can say that the engineers and ad people there are probably some of the best I've worked with in my career. The com

• takdi 10y ago
  Why is it mafia like?
  • ianai 10y ago
    It's a fringe of society so people get abusive. I thought once you worked for a porn company you would almost never get out of the industry.
    • cerrelio 10y ago
      Usually. There were a lot of lifers there. I left the company about a decade ago and I'd say about 80% of the people I worked with are still there. However, my particular skill set is very adaptable and I found better pay elsewhere. Regardless, I very much miss the engineering culture I experienced there.
  • Raphmedia 10y ago
    I know that some companies are very secretive about it. One big company here in Montreal never advertise that they develop pornographic products. You kind of know it from word of mouth or it's a surprise during the interview. They also change name every other year. They don't want they employees to be stigmatized for it, I would guess.
  • 67726e 10y ago
    I'd be curious to learn more about that as well. I've had recruiters for MindGeek reach out to me several times and the whole "separate company but really just an arm of the porn company" thing seemed a little strange. It made sense when the recruiter explained not everyone wants a porn company on their resume, but they went so far as to have a fake company website and and everything to really sell it. What else do they do that's sketchy?
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    Well, they actually did have (veiled) connections to various mafias. They had associates who just hung out all day in strip clubs and solicited girls (with the consent of the owners). Where do you think all those eastern European and Latina chicks starring in porn come from? Strip clubs are an entirely different level of shady. Also, at the company I worked at, they had a sort of level of employee where you were "made". You got to go on lavish trips (the owner had a private jet) and dinners with executives. At that point, you had a job for life as long as you didn't fuck them over.
    • harryjo 10y ago
      I don't doubt (or endorse) claims of mafia connections, but I don't see how "recruiting at a strip club" is shady or criminal.
      • cerrelio 10y ago
        Two words: sex trafficking. (To elaborate - strip club owners would often set up dorms where women hung out all day doing cam stuff. They would "import" the women, but eventually the porn companies came up with a less risky idea. They simply went to the origin countries and set up (with the help of the shadier people) these porn dorms. No need to illegally bring talent into other countries.)
      • nickpsecurity 10y ago
        What cerrelio is describing happens in my area, too. Another common technique is a modification of pickup-artist stuff where they make lots of fraudulent promises, push them into more risky stuff, often pressure them to do initial stuff in isolation, and/or use drugs for dependence. This is not to say that many women don't do it just for the money, fun, etc. There's groups that use those techniques to pull them. It's those that push them which we're referring to. I don't know the ratio but there's a lot of pushers.
        • digi_owl 10y ago
          Makes me think of something i read a while back, about a "professional" (guy seems to have his own online show or something) pick-up artist. He claimed that he hated Nordic women, because his usual MO of offering economic support didn't work. This thanks to the Nordic welfare model.
  • reynoldsbd 10y ago
    Have a listen to the Codebreaker podcast about internet porn. It's gives some pretty interesting insight into the internet porn industry, mostly from the social and business point of view. http://www.marketplace.org/2015/11/18/tech/codebreaker-it-evil-ep-2-internet-porn http://www.marketplace.org/2015/11/18/tech/codebreaker-it-ev...
• noname123 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing your xp. I always thought that working for ManWinn (the proprietors of PornHub and Brazzer etc) in Montreal would be an interesting xp. Wasn't even thinking about the technical challenges but thought maybe in a business where you are selling a primal human desire, you cannot be coy and hide behind the usual BS startup-speak, "changing the world by bringing joy to the inspired accountants and internet markers of the world via artisanal book-keeping SaaS/AdWords campaign dashboards written in GoFluxReduxGoRustEmberElixir and handcrafted in California, lightly dressed with material responsive design"... "No, we're the proprietors of amateur and Brazzer Network-produced porn using PHP and web-design from the 90's (yes complete with the old plain pop-up's but none of that new subscription modal pop-up dark pattern), but our customers' penises do not care - in fact they love it." When you're building software for a specialized field like finance, health care etc., the end-impact is always obscured by layers of product managers, business analyst and the domain where you have no knowledge - web development in porn seems like a good biz to be into where "I'm not only the Hair Club president, but also a client."
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    You're right. Porn sites in general are poorly designed from the UI side. But the fact is, porn users will go through hoops to find what they want. Eventually the porn companies got into analytics (I'd say in the mid- to late- 2000's), and the ones who used that data to improve their products took off. One thing about being an engineer there was that you did actually own the product end-to-end. I remember taking systems from development to production without all the bullshit you normally encounter at large corporations. I would put something into production and my boss (the CTO) would leisurely say "Oh yeah, contact so-and-so in ops to have them secure the server." I would do that, and I didn't get a freak-out like you'd experience in more straight-laced companies: "YOU PUT THIS IN PRODUCTION WITHOUT FILLING OUT ALL THE REQUIRED JIRA TICKETS AND APPROVAL FROM 3 LAYERS OF MANAGEMENT?!?! WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO TAKE THIS DOWN AND HAVE A MEETING!" Nope, a dude in ops, who was usually stoned, would log in, add all the necessary protections and even redeploy the whole stack if he had to. No griping. One thing about it was that you'd have to be okay with some unscrupulous/unethical practices. Copyright infringement is par for the course in that industry. Studios/companies stealing others' content is unavoidable (and encouraged). I remember when I wrote a tube site and I was given a list of other tube sites to rip content from. For that particular project the product manager (who was also a high-ranking exec) strongly emphasized two things: every action had to be trackable, and it was a necessary requirement that handling DMCA take-down notices had to be a very streamlined and automated process. Why? They would have people monitor which videos were heavily viewed and which were taken down frequently. If a particular studio's content generated lots of traffic but were frequently taken down, the sales/ad guys would contact that studio to make a deal. If no deal was struck, then an "anonymous user" would reupload the content to the site; starting the cycle again. Eventually that would wear down the studio into cutting a rev-sharing deal. Sometimes the company would buy the studio outright, if it made enough sense.
• Rudism 10y ago
  This also describes my experience in the online advertising industry. Come up with an idea that has a chance of increasing traffic or revenue, implement it within a few days, throw it into prod. Then you analyze the bejeezus out of it while tweaking/iterating (usually multiple times per day), but abandon it after a few weeks or months if it turns out to be a dud. Then move on to the next big idea. It was actually really exhilarating, if you could overlook the fact that the work you're doing offered absolutely zero value to anyone involved except the bosses whose pockets you were lining if you succeeded. I don't work at a large global corp now, but at a small company (can't really call it a startup anymore, though that's how I would have described it a year or two ago), where there is still a relatively quick development cycle, but it's glacial compared to what I did at that last job. We are also trending toward much slower turn around times as we grow, which there was no danger whatsoever of at my ad industry job. It's unfortunate that these developer-candy-store development cultures largely seem to be limited to get-rich-quick industries which can be unattractive from an ethical standpoint, or new startups which can be unattractive from a job security standpoint.
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    I get the feel that we are seeing the same play out in online (and semi-online) video games as well. Come up with a new "widget", implement, push it out there, monitor monitor monitor, if players don't embrace just leave it to rot while you push out the next one.
  • Mikushi 10y ago
    To have worked in both (Pornhub Lead Dev a few years ago when it took off, and more recently tech architect at some ad shop), advertising is wayyy shadier and scummier than porn, no doubt. I lasted barely a year in advertising, the whole industry is a scam, top to bottom, big players and small, just scam and horrible people. Worked 5 years at MindGeek/Manwin, saw/did some dodgy shit but nothing that made me want to distance myself from the industry.
    • csomar 10y ago
      Could you shed some light about the shady practices in the Advertising industry?
• zer0gravity 10y ago
  I suppose it takes some open-mindedness to work in porn industry, and apparently that is reflected in their technology too. Makes sense.
• veeragoni 10y ago
  silly question. what do you used to say when someone asked "Where do you work?". Were you always had to give explanations? did you avoid telling where you worked?
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    I would say "a social media site", because they had a few properties that weren't adult content. After I left, I contracted normal gigs for a bit to put some distance between me and the company. However, I was never asked in interviews about the nature of the company.
  • bcheung 10y ago
    Most of them have innocent sounding names. You just give the name of the actual company. They don't have anything online that you can find about them. When asked what you do... "internet marketing".
• pimeys 10y ago
  I've been thinking for a while that at some point in my life it would be nice to work for a porn site. High traffic and big challenges. Not so different from the ad or fintech, but I'd prefer porn over those two anytime.
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    My advice would be to either produce and distribute porn, or drive traffic to porn sites. Those are the only two roles where you bank. I wrote an analytics subsystem for my company's properties and I saw how much their affiliates make. If you were even partially effective at driving traffic, you could clear $75k/year. Their top affiliates would come closer to $1M/year. These were just individuals (sometimes they worked in pairs) who were great at SEO and building links mostly. The drawback to driving traffic is that the porn companies are constantly shaving you. You had to track each of your referrals very carefully. Though generally, if the affiliates saw they were getting fucked over, they just switched off their firehose and directed it to another porn company. That always resulted in a face-to-face meeting with apologies and increased incentive to redirect the firehose.
    • pimeys 10y ago
      More interested about the traffic and backend (pun maybe intended) challenges in a big porn site. Advertisement has the traffic but porn is more interesting :)
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• throwaway6666 10y ago
  I've been curious about this - how is it to work for the porn company as a developer? Assuming you're comfortable with the X-rated content that is being distributed, any specific differences other than what you already highlighted? Was there any stigma when moving forward? Do devs meet/hang around with the production staff, or are distribution and production entirely separate? Compensations comparable? Anything else?
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    The only stigma I experienced was self generated. I wouldn't tell people where I worked for a while. However, after that period of shame, whenever I told someone I worked in porn, they had a positive attitude and dozens of questions. After moving to the Bay Area and going to several parties were Google/Facebook/Yahoo engineers were present, they would actually be very interested in what I did. Devs rarely hung out with the production staff. I almost never saw the talent. The production was done in warehouses several miles from where the back office work was done. However, the owners occasionally threw parties where the talent would show up. If you wanted to fuck a porn star you met at these parties, you could, if you were mostly discreet about it. Devs would also go to tech conferences (flying first class no less), but we never shared the nature of our business with people we met (at least I never did). Compensation was comparable/above average, perks were good (free membership at high-end gyms, fully paid health insurance), but bonuses were meager and there were essentially no equity possibilities. However, after 1.5 years working in the area of the country where I was, I had enough saved to put a down payment on a nice condo. I didn't, and I used that money to move to the Bay Area, where I had to start that process all over. And the Bay Area is definitely not a place where a developer can buy a condo after saving for ~2 years.
    • yarou 10y ago
      Sounds like a wild ride (no pun intended).
    • 01Michael10 10y ago
      Fuck a porn star? There are few things less appealing than fucking a porn star. Not without a ten foot pole anyway...
• kchoudhu 10y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, how does one re-enter "polite society" after working for a porn company? (I'm not saying that working for a porn company is bad! Far from it. It just seems like it would be really difficult to break back into the corporate mainstream after working for a porn company due to the raised eyebrows during the screening process.)
  • nickpsecurity 10y ago
    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.
    • IThoughtYouGNU 10y ago
      I think I'd mess with the candidate if I saw the resume come across my desk, familiar with the name. "So, would you say this was a service oriented platform?" Pause "Who was getting serviced?"
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    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.
• samsonradu 10y ago
  This. I work for a mid sized adult company for over 4 years now and it definitely feels like a start-up. We try new things a lot, very little bureaucracy and a lot of interesting challenges. The industry is indeed secretive because of the way outsiders see it. But that can also be an advantage, you don't need to worry about a VC funded startup that will kick you out of the market by burning a ton of money. Only thing I worry about is the label I'm getting but I guess I will find out later on about that.
  • busterarm 10y ago
    Know of any opportunities in companies like this in NY?
    • samsonradu 10y ago
      Not really, I m on the other side of the globe :)
• relyio 10y ago
  That's what I always suspected, the sheer scale at which those platforms operate is impressive by itself. Add to that the stringent standards that users have (in an industry where you are a google search away from finding a competitor). I have a couple questions that I hope you would not mind answering: - Is there a stigma to have such company on your resume? (for a technical position obviously) - Could you elaborate on the engineering culture, the salaries and the general atmosphere? What do you mean by mafia-like?
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    No stigma. The company name is pretty innocuous/generic and most people interviewing you at large tech companies never dig further than your resume. They do ask about the projects I did though. The engineering culture was great. Most of the engineers were genuinely about trying new stuff, improving the sites and were heavily into tech outside of the office. Every engineer who made it past the 90-day probation period was solid/competent. Management was very selective during the probation period. I would say about 60% of new hires left or were fired before probation was over. If you made it through, you really had to fuck up to get fired. They were pretty conservative about their stacks. I see why, because it's hard to hire in that industry. They want to keep their stacks as uniform and simple as possible, so the skill requirements were easy to meet. However, no one was constantly vetting your projects. If you wanted to use something new, and it worked, they didn't care. You owned the whole process. Getting resources wasn't too difficult, if the project was desired by management. A fat pipe to serve content? You got it. Tons of storage for media? You got it. Servers to process large amounts of media? You got it. There were never any meetings of any sort. I only attended 3 meetings in my entire time there. We had 10-minute scrum-type stand-ups now and then, but it wasn't religiously followed. I miss this aspect the most. I can't tell you, as an engineer, how resentful I am that managers take up 2-3 hours of my week because they need to fill slots in their calendar to prove they're "working." Salaries were competitive with the area; at least 50% above the median household income. When I was given an offer, they gave me 10% more than I asked for, which has never happened to me before. I actually think I was underpaid relative to coworkers, and could have asked for 20-30% more and gotten it. Perks were okay; raises and bonuses were minimum. Promotions were very rare, but someone told me engineers, in general, don't often get promotions (this is my experience at my current company - one developer out of 20 in my department got promoted last cycle). The general atmosphere is unlike anything I've experienced before. It's a boys club. The only women in the company were assistants/secretaries - of two types: related to their boss, or fucking their boss. There were women who worked in accounting and HR, but they were located away from the the rest of the company. All the engineers, QA, designers and salespeople were men. Surprisingly there were no real HR issues I heard of. I guess when you're dealing with all men, they tend to work out differences among themselves. I rarely got into the office before noon, because my boss wouldn't come in until after 2pm. Very relaxed and pet friendly. There was a little hazing of new employees, but nothing abusive. It's a culture you wouldn't find at a modern "let's be inclusive and supportive with hugs and validation of everyone's concerns" corporation. It was mafia-like in the way that there was an inner circle of employees that didn't give you much regard. But if you proved yourself, they warmed up to you and welcomed you.
• jomamaxx 10y ago
  "It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow." It might have something to do with profitability and margins. When you make a lot of money, it's easier to justify investments.
• return0 10y ago
  Maybe it has to do with the nature of the subject. Nobody is gonna get hurt if they go offline for a few hours (unless blue balls count). And customers will keep coming back if the ... product is good. They might not be so careless with paying customer info though.
• bcheung 10y ago
  I worked in the industry as well, pretty much all angels (agent, photographer, webmaster, videographer, programmer). I second that programmers are given a lot of flexibility and that development tends to be much faster. There's a lot less overhead. I don't agree with the fact that porn is a frontier of tech anymore. Just read some of the forums on GFY (NSFW). They are all using PHP still and are absolutely clueless about anything that was invented after 2004. Also, read through the API docs for some of the billers. It's amazing how bad the docs and APIs are. And no, I'm not going to give you FTP access to my server to set up your "script" because I haven't used it in over a decade, and second, I'm not giving you access to my server period. Who the hell still uses FTP? LOL The porn industry is like the Cuba of the tech world. Lots of fun times. Lots of horror stories too. Very unethical stuff going on though. Funny thing is, the porn sets were probably more ethical than the programming jobs. All kinds of shady stuff happen at porn tech companies. Making the favicon look like a lock to fool users into think it was a secure site. Creating fake sites en masse just to get credit card approval because the accounts got shut down so fast for deceptive hidden cross sales.
  • toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > Also, read through the API docs for some of the billers. It's amazing how bad the docs and APIs are. I tried really hard to use Stripe to bill for an adult project I was working on (which was being built with Django so I could learn Python, which I needed to sharpen up on for my day gig), and Stripe wouldn't budge on it because it was an adult site. I was willing to hold excessive reserves, accept chargeback charges at a higher rate, whatever. Ended up having to use a well-known biller instead. Some of the tools the adult industry ends up using is solely because there are limited options for that business avenue, and because of that, captive audience.
    • bcheung 10y ago
      Yeah, have to use something like CCBill or Epoch but they charge way more because it is "high risk". Can't stand their APIs though.
      • deleted 10y ago
• epynonymous 10y ago
  just imagining the perks and benefits, free high quality porn for all employees! joking aside, you never hear about porn companies hiring, how did you get in?
• chris_wot 10y ago
  This reminds me when I once did a spot of consulting for a tobacco and cigarette company. Whilst I felt utterly conflicted, all the staff were pleasant, open and oddly conpletely honest about their situation in Australia. Basically, tobacco is one of the most regulated, taxed and restricted products in Australia. The government doesn't take kindly to them, no matter who is in power, so they have to be incredibly careful to follow the rules as closely as possible. The company I consulted at decided that as they needed to do it anyway they decided to use that to their advantage and did something interesting: they tried to incorporate the regulations into their process improvement model and leveraged the regulations to, rather ironically, increase their efficiency and expand their market share in an increasingky shrinking overall market. They used over-regulation to their advantage. I've never seen anyone else do this, and whilst I frankly find what they do deadset evil (hence my conflicted feelings on this job) I could not help but to be impressed by the most innovative response to a frankly impossible situation.