Ask HN: How do companies working in immoral industries find employees? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do companies working in immoral industries find employees?

There are industries like adult videos which some people might say are immoral.

I am simply curious. I see startups having major problem in hiring where they often fail to attract potential hires.

Some startups are understaffed and their weakness shows when their product go down. Don't get me wrong, i understand every product can go down.

But the adult websites/gambling, their app and website keeps working and I've not heard of major data breaches, downtimes or payment failures compared to the startups in other industries.

That may imply that they've good tech people working for them.

How do they find employees? And why would someome work for them when they could be working for world changing startups and big companies?

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I worked for a porn website many moons ago.

> But the adult websites/gambling, their app and website keeps working and I've not heard of major data breaches, downtimes or payment failures compared to the startups in other industries.

That is not quite right. It's just not publicly announced. Not many people would complain on twitter that something is not working. I remember when I was monitoring our systems I saw that there were at any time 2 maybe 3 "hackers" trying to find exploits in our code from the outside.

You can also buy a lot of personal data from porn and gambling websites through certain channels.

But overall: the adult entertainment business is a tough one. It was back in the day quite interesting for me to work on a high scaled business. we delivered our own ads - who gets the opportunity to work on something that needs to deliver 1M impressions per hour at 20 yrs? Some more perks were included, that were quite nice like remote working but for full payment. I lived on a finca on Majorca, Spain. With the paycheck of a regular contractor in Germany.

I cannot say that there was a lot of talent working in the space. Our payment provider was sometimes down for several hours because unchecked/untested deployments, but we had to use them because they had old contracts with credit card companies before they made it hard for adult websites to collect payments.

This is pretty interesting. Did you ever have to interact/view the content?

I almost took a job at a porn company (streaming based) but declined not due to ethical concerns but rather due to the fact that I got a bad vibe from the CEO (he seemed like an ass).

> This is pretty interesting. Did you ever have to interact/view the content?

I was 20 at the time, so yeah, of course.

The ethical concern, I agree. It's not something that you might want to bring up on a first date or when you visit your grand parents. So for that purpose I worked for "a web development company".

Your vibe with the boss, yeah, there are some black sheeps. But working for public companies later on I gotta say I had the most relaxed people working in my team. In general, ethical questionable (the kind that doesn't kill anyone at least) industries tend to have the nicest people I ever met professionally.

It greatly differs what people see as immoral. I wouldn't work for a defense / weapons company or for a tobacco company but i don't regard adult entertainment as immoral if it isn't run that way.

> why would someone work for them when they could be working for world changing startups and big companies?

You can be a world changing startup that, say, sets up web sites for businesses, and early on a porn company can come in and want to be a customer, and have a fat bank account. I have seen and heard about it happening. You're not exactly working for a porn company, you're working for, say, a cloud company, half the bills of which are paid for by one company that is streaming VR porn, because maybe AWS/Google/Azure doesn't want to host them.

Most of the people I've met that have done tech work for porn were doing it in this capacity, part-time for one or two customers. I only met one guy who was a full-time porn tech guy. IIRC, he was in his mid-20s and was going to college full-time as well, and the company was willing to be flexible about his schedule since they had trouble finding good people.

Well, you have to keep in mind a few things here. Firstly, not everyone agrees that adult content/porn or gambling is 'immoral', and in many places that attitude is a fair bit relaxed than it is in the US. If you don't see it as 'immoral', then frankly, working for a company in such a market is no different to working for anyone else.

Then in many cases there are the job perks offered. For instance, while these types of companies won't outspend Google or Facebook in terms of developer salaries, I have heard their wages are pretty high for the markets they're hiring in, and they apparently do offer things like events and more relaxed working environments than other companies.

In other words, the same way finance firms often get good tech people working for them.

Because not everyone considers these industries to be immoral.

Morals - as opposed to ethics and ethical behaviour - very much depend on your personal point of view.

Some people object to porn. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with porn or adult entertainment as long as all parties involved are consenting adults.

Personally, I consider working for defence contractors or intelligence agencies to be objectionable. Many people however don't feel embarrassed by it and even take pride in their work in those industries.

Apart from ethical questions, technical challenges might be a part of it. Scaling a huge video site - adult or not - is no simple task.

Money. The porn and gambling industries generate massive revenue and there's little risk of failure versus most startups. It's not like porn and gambling are going to run out of customers anytime soon. You don't necessarily need to be a good person to be good at tech. I'm not saying it's right, it's just an unfortunate reality in many industries and tech is no exception.

Porn is an incredibly challenging industry to profit on.

I know a guy that was the CTO of one of the world's biggest porn providers. Before that he worked in AI for the Department of Homeland Security. He didn't look at it as moral/immoral nor did he judge the other people in the business. It was about money, and the job paid very very well.

Easy: not everyone finds those businesses “immoral”.

Many find it blends very nicely with their own personal libertarian attitudes. This blending is made even smoother by the nice paychecks these industries offer. e.g. algorithm engineers, quants/mathmaticians, etc. in gambling businesses, site reliability and streaming engineers at adult sites. These are hard technical problems, of the exact same nature as any trading business or netflix. Why wouldn’t an engineer be attracted to them? Not everyone shares the same moral values. And a lot of technically minded folks tend to have some libertarian tendencies.

I’d like to add something to what I wrote earlier: how is it any more “moral” to be working for any company whose primary revenue source is based on sneaking up ads on unsuspecting people and tracking all manner of personal data without permission? At least in the case of an adult site or a gambling site, the proposition is very clear - you know what you’re going there for and that’s what you get. On the other hand, nobody goes to a website for the express purpose of giving away their personal data and getting stealth cookies on their machines to track their every move. I’d argue working for any of the ad-network or personal-data companies is more immoral compared to working for a casio company.

first, "immoral" is a matter of taste and/or opinion; and still, porn for example is always on the verge of innovation dealing with massive amounts of customers, data security, copyrights and billing, long before anybody else. There's always another nice interesting problem to be solved by a competent engineer. Old story ( http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/index... ) but it drove the adoption of VHS over betamax, blueray over dvdrom, etc...

Religiously speaking, banking and other interest-charging businesses are probably more immoral. Payday loans, mortgages, credit cards, car loans, store credit, etc.

Hunger.

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