I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety:
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What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?
I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.
I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations:
* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.
* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]
* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.
* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.
* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]
* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.
That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:
* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.
* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.
* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.
* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."
In case you are wondering:
* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.
* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.
* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.
[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine.
[2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...
[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.
> It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.
teeheehee you said top
I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting the work culture. I'm a little surprised, and relieved to hear how professional it sounds.
-----
What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?
I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.
I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations:
* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.
* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]
* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.
* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.
* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]
* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.
That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:
* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.
* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.
* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.
* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."
In case you are wondering:
* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.
* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.
* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.
[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine.
[2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...
[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.