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 company I worked for several years ago was eventually acquired by MindGeek (formerly Manwin) after I left.
It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow. If an idea sounded like it could bring more traffic or increase the quality of traffic, they'd let you do it. If that idea didn't pan out in a short period of time (~3 months), then it was canned and they tried something new.
I work at a very large global corporation now and I'm shocked (and bored) at how drawn out their development cycles are, and at how little license they give their engineers to be creative. The risk averseness makes it almost impossible to bring anything into production.
I'd go back to porn if it weren't for the fact the industry as a whole seems to be very secretive and mafia-like.
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."
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.
Actually the last part makes great sense - it pretty much is what allowed music platforms to proliferate. It levels the playing field where you no longer are fleeced mercilessly.
I mean, I use Libgen and usually get enough books to cost me 5k or 10k €. Hopefully it will bring sanity into that market (Even though it is already blocked in UK, for some obscure reason)
Take my Spotify away and I'll probably just stop caring about music that much at all
> Blocking access to the ibgen.org and libgen.in website has been made pursuant to a Court Order dated 19 May 2015 obtained by the members of the Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and others.
> Any TalkTalk customer affected by the Court Order has a right under the Court Order to apply to vary or discharge it. Any such application must:
> (i) clearly indicate the identity and status of the applicant;
> (ii) be supported by evidence setting out and justifying the grounds of the application; and
> (iii) be made on 10 days notice to all of the parties to the Court Order.
They unfortunately have datacaps and don't offer fiber only openreach FTTC style connections at best and at about 3 times what I pay for 1gbit up/down in London ATM.
In Germany ibgen.org redirects to http://gestao.ibgen.com.br/aluno/ and libgen.in is just displaying a parked domin site. Or are those outdated domains?
> "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!"
This is totally OT, but during my training at a large corporation, I was building a very simple web application and found it desirable to access the corporate phone directory to augment some of the information I presented to the users.
I looked around a little and discovered that there was indeed an LDAP server that served the phone directory for the entire freaking company. It would even speak to me after I did an anonymous bind. ;-) So I wrote my web application, handed it off to the guy who ended up maintaining it (me being a trainee and all), and the I thought I'd be a good corporate citizen and checked what I had to do to "legally" access that LDAP server. Turns out I had fill out an application form that was something like six pages long.
Unfortunately, filling out that form and sending it to the designated address were my last actions as a member of that team, as my time with that particular team was up. So I never found out if "they" rejected the application or not. (I guess they approved it, because if it was such a big deal, they would not have opened that LDAP server for anonymous access, but you never know - could have been plain stupidity.)
That seems to be the entirety of the last two jobs I've had too - go and build something in dev that's incredibly useful but not signed off/uses APIs that'd need a 6 month review process for (did something similar with LDAP access, found an endpoint and used it for something infinitely more useful to the business), once IT finds out about it, I get my wrist slapped, but have built a fairly solid business case in only a few days, and get to fasttrack through sign off to production.
Ruffle a few feathers, but organisational inertia would kill off anything particularly useful for our teams that are 24/7 fighting fires.
No, the information they wanted was actually surprisingly reasonable - how many requests per day was my application going to make, how many concurrent connections, how many people would be using my app, what kind of information did I need, what did I need it for, who could they contact if my application turned out to be - intentionally or by accident - DOS'ing the LDAP server(s), and so forth.
I just found it kind of funny that I should fill out a six-page form to get information I could technically access already, anonymously. (Also, it was the first time I saw such a form, that might have been a bit of a culture shock for me.)
Granting anonymous access would be a matter of organization precedent, but I can imagine a world where it's encouraged to dev against these services and notify upstream service owners when stuff is about to change reasonably ahead of time (too soon and too many chefs might come, unfortunate reality).
I think every service owner should know who their 'customers' are, it's important because of things like Pager Duty rotations for example. Remember that scene from Hackers, "God wouldn't be on this late?"... in a sense, the 6 page form might seem like overkill but it beats sifting through a conversational email thread asking for all the same pieces of information. They could gamify the form I suppose, if that's better than a paper form... but on their end there should be a spreadsheet used for op budgeting etc and they need the info.
I see - at my work I'm currently encountering change requests and they are about the same thing. Papers/requests explaining in baby steps what is going on so it can be replicated.
It's my first time coming across them - I suppose it's a good idea, but slightly overkill since I write documentation for my code and it's in source control as well.
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.
That made me laugh. The guy in charge of securing a production server is usually stoned...
It was amazing. Half of devops was stoned during work hours. I actually think it helped, because they usually had their hands full and probably needed stress relief. In spite of being stoned, they were far more competent and responsive than any devops personnel I've had to deal with since then. They really knew their shit, because porn sites are a big target for scammers, hackers, etc. They always knew about the latest exploits, backdoors and whatnot.
A couple decades ago, I worked support for a smaller national ISP (since swallowed and re-swallowed up), where at the time the "unofficial" drug test policy was, "you bring 'em, we'll test 'em."
I do think the porn industry by nature tends to push some limits in terms of tech... It's to the likes of the riaa, mpaa and LinkedIn to be the ones who push the bounds of unscrupulous tech.
I've been saying for years, eventually it will have to come full circle, that ad delivery controls will have to be first party, and that if they continue to push the overbearing, over the top ads, people will just not read the content and leave. That's what will start to come next. FTR, it didn't have to be via websocket, it could still be services, rpc, and other channels... though websocket to a canvas would allow for a different level of control, and less chance for adblock bypass.
All the same, it's interesting and somewhat cool...
Devops working for a porn company getting stoned because they are stressed... interesting you say they had their hands full. Maybe that's why they didn't get any work done? :P
If he was able to reduce his job to a handful of carefully crafted puppet scripts, he earned the right to do things as he pleased, and that was his motivation for working in porn. I knew guys in college who got baked every day and were in objectively hard majors like MechE. I've learned not to judge.
Deployments should be automated to the point where you can do them drunk / in a high-octane emergency situation. I consider "locking down a server" to be part of said deployment process.
Exactly, when I was Lead Dev on Pornhub, I had more than once a phonecall at 2 or 3am while out partying having to sort out problems and deploy. All streamlined, press button, deploy happens, almost null chance of fuck up and if it would, a simple button click for a split second revert.
I was once placed on a medication that went too far that direction... where I couldn't break out of the single thought path. Where driving was enough of a distraction, that where I was going would slip by, and I had to circle around multiple times. And I had once lost three hours of time and have a couple hundred tabs open in my browser as I started reading an article, then just kept stearing through, etc.
I was encouraged to stick with it for a month to see if it normalized, it didn't... I don't even remember the medication, but would never want to experience that again... I'll take the half dozen to dozen stray thoughts in my head at once... I'm far more effective that way. Though stress makes it hard to get/stay asleep.
Its worth pointing out that the effects vary by strain and some are better for some kind of work than others. For example, I don't think I could work well on most indica strains, but they may help me with creative problem solving (in smaller doses that don't make me too sleepy).
If you were suffering from clinical anxiety as PTSD and ACE patients do then you might find cannabis to be the one thing that makes your mind clear of distracting fear and flashbacks. Assuming that all people and minds and drugs interact in the same way is a huge mistake.
Some people I know only go to the porn sites to steal their code. I'm surprised you say that about the UX side because there is some nice libs in there and weird stuff with jquery. There is always that danger though that you might see something. So, not so great.
I'd define one of the dividing lines between small company and big company as "where you start needing to get approval to do the basic parts of your job". Not saying one is better than the other, just that all companies seem to go through this period where you start needing forms filled and approval E-mails to do more and more. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.
It's when it takes weeks for something that should be rubber-stamp approved it becomes more of an issue...
For the record, I'm currently working at a financial institution, worked at another previously, and moving into a position with a medical industry company. It's a matter of striking a balance.. and there are others that cope with it far better than I do.
I still find it funny, when you have full github proper access, but can't access gists... and then when searching for things, a lot of programming examples, and even blog articles reference gists... that is painfully stupid.
Yeah i think all that red tape comes from appeasing the stock market, government agencies, and insurance companies.
Do not have the proper paper trail when shit hits the fan? Well there goes your share value, you get a hefty fine from government oversight, and the premium just went through the roof.
There's a great deal more than just regulations. I'd argue that for one line item of regulation in most poorly organized enterprises (most) you will get at least 10 jobs of bureaucracy to help track it not because of the regulation but because the culture of most companies is about disempowering employees from making decisions as much as possible. This is why the cultural definition of "devops" invoking Deming and empowering workers to make decisions closer to the problem site to me is literally against the existing company culture of Taylorism and sales where managers are worshipped for decision making.
Nobody really fined Target for its data breaches - pretty sure that PCI audits had passed repeatedly, in fact. Their stock easily recovered as well. So why are big companies so worried about security? Because breaches are a drag upon everyone and slows down features and improvements. I'm familiar with environments where change freezes are enacted for months after every critical outage, and nobody's regulations say to do anything like that. That's purely a belief in the false equivalency that stability and development velocity are antitheses. Gosh, someone tell Google and Amazon to fire their SREs and stop deploying any new code to get better availability numbers!
Precisely; in industries where a company can be fined megabucks per day, or be shut-down entirely, for non-compliance those layers of approval and review are unfortunately necessary. Though of course some of them are just jobsworthing by middle managers.
How do porn companies continue to handle credit card payments without complying with PCI standards and processes?
I don't have pr0n industry experience, but I worked for the largest merchant acquirer (MA) (the orgs that allow merchants to accept CCs) in the U.S. The merchant acquirer ecosystem has a pyramid structure where many Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) service specific industries while re-selling CC acceptance from ~6 companies (~80%+ market share). These pr0n companies pay monthly rates that correspond with their chargeback numbers, etc and do not deal directly with the MAs.
Big porn companies are very serious about PCI compliance. They also closely monitor their fraud numbers. If a MID (merchant ID) goes above 5% (volume or cash amount) fraud, the processor could get fined by Visa/MasterCard/etc ($50k+) and lose the right to accept credit card payments for that particular payment network. Processors who handle porn (high-risk) accounts will often have a general, shared account they'll let you use, because they can take measures to average down and hide the fraud. However, they charge you a premium to use that general account, so you're better off using your own if you have other measures to control fraud.
My former company solved this problem by simply acquiring a payment processor company. They had total control over their processing that way. As a bonus, they had access to other porn vendors' account activities, since it was one of the 4-5 major high-risk processors used by porn companies. It was a win-win for them.
re acquisition of their and competition's processor
They just keep getting more clever, devious, and entertaining, don't they? Shit, I'd do my own Braintree for my porn company with the company's positive gains from legit customers covering the losses from the others. Who cares if my bottom line at my main company was good. Success of processor could even pay for better fraud management.
Of course, already having enough cash to buy an established one is always nice. :)
We don't handle the payments ourselves, they re all handled by high-risk merchants so we don't need to worry about being PCI compliant. Fees are bigger than the usual merchant ones though, lots of fraud and chargebacks.
Hey, I prefer lesbian porn myself because not into watching dudes but come on... Most porn is naked woman and men having sex so not seeing dick would be kinda hard. What's wrong? The penis to titillating for you?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I didn't really have any issues. I even went to an educational company serving the K12 vertical in a leadership capacity. It helped I knew the VPE there through other past colleagues but after my interview with the VP of HR it went pretty well.
The funny part was how curious everyone was about what went on there. I never really felt that much stigma about it from others...most of it was actually self generated. The other way I got past the potential stigma, though, was that I discussed how serious the business side was. The analytics we did, how much detailed knowledge we had about what downtime cost us, etc. Our HR training was done by lawyers, not consultants, because if the company got sued they were not going to get a sympathetic jury so I knew what what not to do as a manager there. That was actually pretty attractive to the VP of HR at my next company.
I'm not saying you won't find those that pass on you because of having porn on your resume but I don't think it's that big of an issue. As others have noted before most porn companies do business under a pseudonym that is innocent sounding and it's usually enough to get you past the screening that might filter if it said "Bang Bros" or whatever company it was.
The bigger issue is if you had school aged kids. They'd never have let me talk at career day. :-)
I built a few small adult sites early in my career when I was more a designer than a backend / ops guy.
When asked by a recruiter for more portfolio I said "Well, there are more, but they're adult". Her response was "Wow, I've always wondered about who does those and how that all works!"
and:
"That must be great, you'd have all the passwords!"
> Mind you, this is in the more liberal Australia.
My boss here in Brisbane keeps seriously considering getting into online adult services of some description. He also wants to build a weed dispensary web app, so we can launch the moment they legalise it!
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.
I worked for a big one years back, for several years (rev per year in the hundreds of millions). They had an innocuous alternative business name, that you could use for resumes. I think it may have been the parent company, while the porn-name was a subsidiary.. or something.
Either way, its turned out to be a total non-issue. I always used the innocuous name on my resume, but everybody generally already knew, and nobody cared. Seemed like most people I end up working with have worked there or have had a friend that did or hired someone that did at some point.
Nah, pretty easy. I actually deliberately put it on my resume to filter out companies that would probably be up tight about it.
Most coworkers at companies I have worked at know what I have done in the past. Never had an issue. You don't bring it up at the office and you use calibration and gradually give out details and judge whether coworkers would be cool about it when talking to them outside of work.
Funny you would say this. When I released from prison, I also put my criminal convictions on my resume to filter companies that would be uptight about them. I didn't want to waste time with interviews.
Turned out I only looked for 2 weeks before finding a good job.
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.
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?
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.
Drugs are not prevalent in the porn industry? Are you kidding? I have never read a piece on a porn star where their drug use wasn't mentioned. How do you think most of them cope with their "career" and the "fame"?
Yes, porn stars do get tested for STDs regularly which I believe is generally twice a month. What about the period in between tests? You don't know who they just fucked yesterday or earlier that day.
You must realize for every porn star who has had a long career there are 50 who lasted a minute. There are reasons for that... Yes, many just can't hack it but drug use and STDs are high on the list.
Depending on where in the country they are, porn stars are frequently tested twice a week, and able to provide a detailed history of who they had sex with, when.
I was a programmer and a photographer before I got involved with adult. My first real move into the adult industry was working at an agency in LA that represented porn stars. It was a small home based business and I lived with the owner and whatever models were staying from out of town as well. I answered phones, photographed the models, built the website, and created a custom CRM solution. The pay was absolute shit and was hard to get by but the perks were great. It was an amazing experience.
I shot on set here and there but the money was unreliable. I did shoot once or twice a week at the agency doing portfolio shoots of all the girls. That was a lot of fun. I couldn't believe I was getting paid to do it.
I had to eventually move into full time programming at various companies (pay wasn't good enough at agency) and they were completely separate from content production, they just bought it from someone else usually.
The vast majority of programmers in the adult industry have no exposure to the production side. An agency or production company is where you need to be at. The really small production companies that have production and programming at the same office would get you exposure to it though.
Everyone is completely open about porn and there's no hiding it. It's quite refreshing not having to worry about being PC about anything. There's porn on everyone's computer at work and nobody bats an eye. Surprisingly, there are about the same number of women in a porn tech office as there is in a typical Silicon Valley startup.
The technology is really archaic though. FTP, PHP, Apache, really? It drove me nuts that I wasn't doing anything innovative and I eventually moved back to Silicon Valley.
Would definitely recommend it if you ever get the opportunity though.
Living in a house full of porn stars with different girls cycling through each week, photographing them, and hanging out with them. Not something most nerds like me get the chance to experience.
Working for a porn company isn't much different from working at Facebook or Youtube.
Your goal is to keep people jacked into their streams for as long as possible. To do that you basically take advantage of every human weakness ever documented.
There are better things to do with your time and skills imho.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
PHP is still the best for that type of website, I've done my fair share and that is an undeniable fact. Handles load perfectly, easy maintenance, works well with Redis/Memcached/MySQL, FPM+Nginx is solid, plenty of competent devs available and very very fast development times. What more do you want? It just work and it is not a clusterfuck of modules and libraries.
Front load everything with something like Varnish (Nginx can do some of it to a certain extent) and you'll be handling 15+ millions users a day on a skeleton server stack. Hell back in '09 Pornhub was running smooth on a similar stack with very few servers (when you consider the traffic).
If you ask me most of what was "invented" after 2004 is stuff invented by Google/Facebook who are realistically the only ones needing it, but they saw an opportunity to scoop up market share in dev so they marketed their stack as "bleeding edge". The only thing bleeding is my eyes when I see something that could be wiped up in a standard PHP/Python/Ruby stack but instead is made with so many dependencies and 3rd party library that you wonder if the dude who wrote it actually knows programming or if he just glued cool techs together because Techcrunch and HackerNews say they are cool.
But yes, the smaller players are usually using outdated stuff, then again 99% of the web is. Hence why Wordpress is still a thing.
And as a former Lead Dev of Pornhub, I can assure you that tech peeps definitely are aware of the bleeding edge of tech, just that most have a tendency to not buy the hype. My most recent experience still prove to me that 95% of the cool tech I see mentioned is pure mental masturbation, it makes life easier I keep hearing yet I've never seen it, always a mess, "Goddamnit Grunt!", "Fucking npm", 'Damn dependencies not resolving!", "npm is down", are so commonly heard nowadays I wonder if people who tout it as modern development practice have actually done any "old" school development and realised "modern development" is mostly vendor lockin and provides very little added value to a competent developer.
Yeah. It's almost laughable how little you need to process high volumes. Our stack was PHP/memcache/MySQL, a closed-source front-end cache/web server, and a custom mostly-MVCish framework.
I introduced Redis to the company after using it for a distributed system (the web scraper I built to suck down other tube site content). There was initially pushback from other devs on using redis, because it was new at the time. I ignored their concerns and used it anyway, then they started using it for future projects.
At my current company I feel that the leads are largely driven by articles and buzz they glean from Twitter. They'll make a technology choice on hearsay and then shoehorn it into a running stack. Or if they start a new project, they suck in a whole ecosystem of janky libraries and frameworks that are so abstract or unstable that they end up in a rabbit hole wasting time solving problems in their dependencies. "We can commit this to open source!!!" says the lead. No, you won't. That code is shit, your code is shit, and you're not being paid to solve other people's problems.
Development at porn companies is actually more like a sprint; development at most other companies is like old people shuffling down the nursing home corridor to get their weekly enema - you don't really want to get there, so you go slowly, only because you've got nothing else to do.
Good points. I've had similar feelings about node / react ecosystem. So much damn stuff getting in the way. Actually made the decision to move away from Node / React for my personal stuff. Looking into Haskell / Yesod for side projects. We'll see. Seems really fast for development once you get through the learning curve.
> 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.
It would be a welcome addition. Reputation is huge though. Customer must have confidence they are going to be able to cancel and not be charged for other things. Businesses need to know the company is going to be around and pay out in a timely and reliable manner. iBill was a company that stole a bunch of people's money a little over a decade ago and lots of people in the biz are extremely cautious because of it.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
More like Russia over Hungary over Czech and Romania. Russians have their safe heaven in Russia because there's no foreign competition, and the mafia-like connections do help. Hungary's golden age is over.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
It's largely the reason why I left. As I learned more about the industry it was less palatable. They do take steps to shield themselves and reduce their liability. Let's face it, if you're a top dog at a large porn company, you live a charmed life. These guys don't want to go to jail or have the government poking around in their business.
The whole industry is legitimized by one object: a camera. If you pay someone to have sex, it's prostitution. If you pay someone to have sex and you record it, it's business. This very fine line is one they constantly walk; they're always a step away from criminal behavior.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow. If an idea sounded like it could bring more traffic or increase the quality of traffic, they'd let you do it. If that idea didn't pan out in a short period of time (~3 months), then it was canned and they tried something new.
I work at a very large global corporation now and I'm shocked (and bored) at how drawn out their development cycles are, and at how little license they give their engineers to be creative. The risk averseness makes it almost impossible to bring anything into production.
I'd go back to porn if it weren't for the fact the industry as a whole seems to be very secretive and mafia-like.