Heh, this is true. However, everyone always misunderstands why. I can speak to this from two perspectives. I worked in Porn early in my career and made the tran

Heh, this is true. However, everyone always misunderstands why. I can speak to this from two perspectives. I worked in Porn early in my career and made the transition. I also actively try to recruit people with this background in a city which has lots of great engineers work in this area (montreal). The reason why people say that they get locked into porn ( at least on the software producing side of the fence, mind you ) is very similar to the reason why people get locked into working for the finance industry. There are nuances but it essentially comes down to two things: money and attitude. If you are good at engineering and if you are willing to work for this industry ( a small minority ) you can make crazy money. The industry is pretty meritocratic, long before that became a buzz word in Silicon Valley. If you generate millions of dollars in value for your company, you can take millions of dollars home. Very few industries allow you to make this kind of money, and since the people who work there are self selected to not mind, it's tough for them to leave. Some social factors sometimes compel them to move to other industries anyway ( such as starting a family ) at which point the second problem comes into play. The second problem is your mindset. The porn industry ( sometimes similar to financial ) has the opposite relationship with it's customers from other industries. You treat the customers as bags of money that ought to be exploited. "After all, they are all wankers" is what you hear a lot. This may sound basic but if that's the reality you have spend a decade in, you will find it tough to adjust for startup life. Especially startups are usually very good at finding a business model where their own success depends on the success of their customers ( Square, Stripe, my own Shopify, etc). Life is much happier in a setup like this but it's totally alien to people from the Industry. These things are huge contributors at keeping people from the industry in the industry.