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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

I worked there for 2 months, AMA.

Would be great to hear in general what the work environment was like, what the work itself was like, the holiday parties, etc. From previous AMAs for this and similar companies, the takeaway seems to always be: It's a lot more "normal" inside the company than people expect.

Some specific questions:

* When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?

* Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.

> It's a lot more "normal" inside the company than people expect.

It was, just a tech company doing tech things.

> or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?

We had some public domain videos playing on a loop for internal testing environments, or some "screensaver" type videos.

> Do people become totally desensitized to it?

Yes, and relatively quickly too. The regular content was more looked at as a curiosity. "You found someone doing _what_?" "Let me see."

> * When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?

Real videos. People not wanting to work directly in contact with pornography is a huge problem to recruitment.

> * Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.

Depends what you do, a regular developer probably doesn't look at a lot of porn except when testing their stuff in a near-prod setting. Some people watch porn all day (eg video editors) and there's a high turnover rate there.

Oh, and the work environment was oddly corporate.

Was there any effort to hide the end product to employees? I know that from the outside, MindGeek tries to look like any regular tech/data company. Is there a gap between the software side of things and the "pornhub website" team? Is the video department hidden? How is the culture?

No it's not. It's pretty open overall. People sometimes discuss tech/business details in front of porn scenes as well because you have to. And perhaps among the first few questions HR is going to ask if you are OK with working for a XXX company (they didn't say it directly on my case but hinted enough) during the recruit process.

> People sometimes discuss tech/business details in front of porn scenes as well because you have to

Now I am picturing an open office plan with a porn set one one end of it. Surely the studios are separated from the software departments?

No it's just some videos played in a TV in meeting room. It was for looking at Chrome dev tools I believe. Studios are not even in Montreal AFAIK but I could be wrong.

Alright, thanks. My other question was about culture.

What is the demographic? Are there a lot of women, gender minorities, etc.? Are things like harassment complaints taken seriously? In short, is it a "locker room" culture or more similar to what you find elsewhere at web agencies in MTL?

It mirrors a regular startup which is more male.

Agencies in general are more populated with women,gender minorities for a variety of reasons.

Porn doesn't hang on the walls. And you are more likely to find harassment outside of a business like this because everyone would try harder to make the female welcome because of the sigma.

Yeah the porn is mostly shot in LA/Miami I think.

No, porn is very much part of the culture. There are posters of porn stars on the walls (like, official company-sponsored posters). Asa Akira is one I remember being a popular "ambassador". They've had porn stars at their office parties.

Were you located in Montreal?

Second question: Do you think there's anything unique about the culture in Montreal (as compared to the rest of Canada) that makes it a good place to have an office of people working on porno related content?

Yes, and I don't think so. People are generally open-minded here but I think the same would be true for most of America at least when it comes to "professional" pornography.

Do they pay within the ballpark of big tech? I imagine some of their scalability problems require the best of the best.

Yeah they'll spend the money on someone they think is worth it

I'll chime in. No they are not offering FAANG or bay areas salaries for equal experience. They would pay wokay for the montreal area. Glassdoor lists a system developer role for under 100,000 cnd.

You can't expect bay area salary outside of the bay area. They'll pay well with the context of the local market.

why only two months?

Trial got terminated because (as a manager) I told my superior who had just kicked off a project specifically mentioning overtime would be needed that if overtime was needed it was likely because we didn't plan properly.

What was their Ops/Infra team like? Is it all self-hosted?

I don't know how much I can say here but when it comes to PornHub and Ads, they're hosted but they pretty much own the host (although they don't, just in the sense that they probably account for 90%+ of that host's income). I was always curious why they didn't straight up buy them - and when I asked I was told it was just less trouble this way. They don't have much of an ops team though they do have a small (<10 devops team)

Is there any legitimacy to the notion their b-model was built effectively on 'piracy' and that they ignored take down requests?

i think the record speaks for itself on this. its pretty well understood what the previous owners were up to and how they originally populated the site with content.

no employee can confirm nor deny this for legal reasons or just lack of access to that part of the system/code.

It’s true of YouTube back in the day, it’s not unreasonable to think it’s probably true of other tube sites too.

I can't really speak to the early history, but I mean they bought most of the Tubesites back then which we all know had a fair amount of piracy - so from a guess, I'd say they were aware and it was part of the strategy, yeah. For the takedown requests, no idea.

i am about to apply for a job there (Montreal). How is the working environment?

It's just a normal tech company inside. What's the pos you are applying for? Just curious.

There's a real corporate feel to it that I didn't expect. Some people have been there for a decade and have gotten very comfortable. There's a strong hierarchy - directors, managers, leads, and everyone else.

Based in Montreal? How secretive was the hiring process?

I know a few people that work there. It's a normal tech company, like many others. There is nothing secretive about it.

I used to live on Montreal and came across PornHub job postings a few times on indeed. Very open, claiming unique challenges due to being the largest porn site in the world, etc.

They don't seem to have anything up atm, maybe they stopped posting on indeed.

Yes. Not secretive at all.

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