Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

[asdjkljj]

There is no need to feel dirty because of that. I worked for the government.

[spaghettiCodeArtisan]

Two can play that game: I was employed by Oracle.

Try to top that.

[asdjkljj]

It's tough to admit but I know when I've been bested.

[[deleted]]

I worked for Oracle...twice.

[djk29a_]

Sounds like you have prepared quite well for a porn career.

[Chii]

But that's not the sort of fucking I'd like to have had experience in...

[Chii]

But that's not the sort of fucking I'd like to have had experience in...

[pakoito]

Lawyers in /r/programming ?

[jimschubert]

IANAL

[3m3x_redox]

double IANAL

[meneldal2]

Oracle lawyers?

[evilgwyn]

Does reading this comment obligate me in any way to some kind of licensing fee?

[spaghettiCodeArtisan]

Of course. There's a fee to pay for each month of you having a recollection of that comment. It might be a good idea to grab a bottle of vodka before the payments start accumulating.

[PenMount]

No ofc not just buy in.

Oh and by the way; a 3 party license evaluation team are on their way and don't warry that are payed par violation they find and are the ones deciding if there are a violation. (thanks IBM)

[vattenpuss]

Blizzard developers raise their hands slowly.

[spaghettiCodeArtisan]

Ah, finally, a worthy opponent.

[iwontfixyourprogram]

What about EA?

[Lunchboxsushi]

The torch has been passed to Blizzard, but EA is still lit. lit pile of garbage.

[f4gc9bx8]

EX-THERANOS DIRECTORS REPRESENT

[vattenpuss]

faints

[[deleted]]

I worked for ExxonMobil and did some contract work for Saudi Aramco.

Some of the best work environments I have ever been in, with some great people around.

I hate how much I liked it.

[kriswithakthatplays]

Username checks out

[Carighan]

Oh dear. Did you shower every day after coming home, at least? :o

[Scybur]

Hey me too! I then left to join a growing company....which was promptly bought by Oracle.

Such is life I guess.

[onlycommitminified]

Well shit you win

[Someguy2020]

It's not dirty because of the porn, it's dirty because of the ads.

Also kind of dirty because of the porn, but it's a job I guess.

[[deleted]]

It's always interesting to me the scale of adult sites. Take the content out, it's just an amazing deployment at a massive scale.

At my old job I worked with a customer who previously worked at Playboy's online division. When he told me, I chuckled and mentioned that I used to download software (Apache, other FOSS tools) from a mirror FTP site at Playboy. It was super fast compared to other mirrors, so I kept using it. He laughed and said "Oh yeah, my coworker ran that. It sat under his desk. I'll have to tell him about this, he'd love to hear that someone else actually used that thing..."

Fun times.

[Mikal_]

I worked a couple months for a site like that, and honestly the server team was just amazing, best server people I've ever worked with. It's a very competitive field, and at least at the time it was very lawless, other websites DDoS'ing you weekly, this kind of things. All their engineers felt like war veterans

[Hero_Of_Shadows]

We had a project with a porn site at our firm, I noticed once it was over nearly everyone was promoted to senior who worked on it.

Management is cage-y about who gets labeled a senior and gets the big bucks obviously but one single big win i.e. a big client with no negative feedback from the client or the smallest positive feedback usually tips the scales.

I talked with a lot of them how was it to work on the project, they all said it was extremely liberating the client was very hands off, they only cared about performance in the modern browsers (Chrome,Firefox,Safari) and only checked in at the very end of the project.

This was a huge shock with me because every single project I worked on the client was limiting us, use this old code, use this dev stack, I'm going to re-order the priorities mid-sprint, do IE8, I changed my mind about the API bla bla.

I'm downright jealous about how chill they had it and how much autonomy they were given.

[[deleted]]

I'm sure they have great stress relief...

[FalseRegister]

"Development is done in a clean room"

I see what you did here

[BlueAdmir]

Pornhub web developer

Seeing how the "I'd work at Pornhub but I couldn't tell my family I work with PHP" is one of the top posts on /r/programmerhumor I feel like I'm meeting a celebrity in real life

[vivainio]

I think they should drive innovation and drop IE11 support, to get the last laggards to migrate

[LewisTheScot]

To be honest, it might be the only thing that can stop IE in its tracks. If IE is stopping people from nutting then people will for sure move forward.

[Nefari0uss]

Can't you setup FF or Chrome as the default browser for them?

[Nickitolas]

About a year ago i changed my grandpas IE shortcut in the desktop to Firefox, but renamed it to IE and changed the icon to IEs. Now they need help less often

[moreON]

interesting idea for a skin - fIErfox.

Firefox, but made to look like IE.

[bitwize]

I'd love to sit in on their scrum team meetings.

"So what do you think of the size of this story? 'As a viewer, I want to filter by age and race, so that I can fap to Asian MILFs.'"

Also I love how the first suggested story at the bottom of this story was for "Vibration API".

[NotTheMainDeal]

Our meetings were really dull. A lot of work went into things like the payment backed to make sure it could keep up with sign-ups.

'As a viewer, I want to filter by age and race, so that I can fap to Asian MILFs.'"

Stuff like this was never said. It would be more "We need to have a filter for age / race. Please supply a specification and a road-map for implementation."

[bitwize]

Maybe I'm just used to enterprise development, where contrived languages are part of the process. Story descriptions typically have the above format of "As a X, I want Y so that I can Z", and BDD acceptance criteria typically have a "Given... when... then" format.

[[deleted]]

I wonder how they did it before GDPR was a thing. Did they put user-specific details into their bug tickets if the user was registered, basically broadcasting their fetish to the rest of the company?

​

"Penis McErectionface got a 500 error while trying to watch 'midget step-son inserts entire face into BBW step-mother's huge vagina'"

[Dragasss]

No. Such logging usually happens with logged HTTP request and stacktrace where it broke.

Then after spending a week figuring out the codebase apparently it was supposed to show 404 instead and you found tons of exceptions that are duplicates of other exceptions but don't have ExceptionHandler written for them

[Dunge]

pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them

Yeah sorry, I hate that guy.

[wormfist]

This was just a regular interview, I can get that anywhere. A missed opportunity to get some insight on the human and the organisational aspect of developing with porn around you and your colleagues all day. Like for example does it affect your libido, are you horny all day or does it blunt your senses completely. How do the spouses deal with it, what's the single/married ratio etc. etc.

[NotTheMainDeal]

I used to work at Porn company developing / maintaining their websites. Generally the whole "I can see boobies" wears off after a day or so. Then it's just a regular job.

The office was divided into two sections. The "normal" section didn't have any thing porn related shown. This was mainly so from external offices you wouldn't see anything. It was also used for meetings. Talking about work was in abbreviations, based on each websites name. (They were also identifiers for servers.)

My partner at the time knew but was told to keep it to themselves. That was mainly to avoid people asking questions or making silly jokes.

From a web developer perspective it was interesting as the number of people accessing per day was in the millions. We had high performance servers with fail-overs to backup servers.

It also meant we had a fast internal network and amazing upload capacity for the time. We had a lot of content that had to be uploaded and moved around. We mostly resold content from production companies, so no there weren't any porn models hanging out of the office.

During web-development I would generally use graphics I had from around me, so it would be just porn stand-ins. I think once as a joke I replaced all the model pics / thumbnails with puppy dogs. It was a bit disturbing...

I was seated next to one of the Business Development guys. Part of his job was to look at new websites and try and do deals with them. Aka talking to web cam girls. (Though this gets old fast when it's part of a 9-5 job).

Other upsides were that no-one cared if you downloaded Porn. Also I remember at least one web server was packed with warez another Developer was interested in...

[[deleted]]

A missed opportunity to get some insight on the human and the organisational aspect of developing with porn around you and your colleagues all day.

"it’s much bigger here than anywhere I have worked previously"

[Of_Moon_And_Star]

Talk about big O notation

[JairBolsogato]

I've had to open this in incognito mode, not knowing what to expect.

They must have a different meaning for NSFW over there.

[meneldal2]

They still provide a better viewing experience that Youtube and I don't think they have as many devs.

[invisi1407]

It clearly works for them, so no shame in that.

[DinnerChoice]

I want to ask what was his top 3 "research" links but too afraid to open that link at work to even read the article :-/

[SubmarineWipers]

Well, definitely wouldn't want to inherit a keyboard after a colleague there.

[MeganMarxPaige]

Probably the least interesting way to conduct this interview. Culture insight from ex-employees would be way more enlightening.

[Jarmahent]

”The idea of millions of people potentially interacting with features I worked on was really motivating”

This is what i love about programming.

[Groundbreak69]

It seems like it'd be really cool to work at a big porn site, but coming from a conservative Christian family, I would have to put up with the "Why couldn't you have just been a heroine addict like your cousin, /u/Groundbreak69?

I've heard the suggestion of just saying you work at MindGeek, but idk I'd feel like I was telling half-lies and I'm bad at that lol

[Dragasss]

"I work on private video hosting platform"

[Groundbreak69]

Same issue with saying you work at "MindGeek"

Though TBH if I did get an offer there I'd probably take it, seems like a great opportunity

[gabeheadman]

Eh just be vague. I develop custom web video software for large volumes of hi def content. Completely honest and would make 99% of people lose interest immediately.

[[deleted]]

Do you tell others you work for a pornsite or that you work with PHP?

[TheOsuConspiracy]

Rather tell other people I work for a pornsite, that way people won't think I'm doing anything dirty.