[FfejL]

OnlyFans is at his core a tech company, with (I'd guess) a stack that looks a lot like any other high volume social media platform. They likely have a decent size engineering group.

Yet all of what I would think of as the expected recruitment links (e.g. https://careers.onlyfans.com/) go nowhere. Quick searches on LinkedIn, Indeed and CrunchBoard come up empty.

Obviously, this is due to their content. But I wonder, how does a company like this recruit good (or at least decent) talent?

[zkid18]

Hey, know a couple folks working in adult companies including the big one like Pornhub,Xhamsters, xxx.com. They mostly employed through a proxy IT shop that from the first glance has nothing to do with adult technology. Also AFAIK you're not allowed to state in your CV the name of the product you have been working on.

[FirmwareBurner]

>They mostly employed through a proxy IT shop that from the first glance has nothing to do with adult technology.

aka Geekmind

[morkalork]

Mindgeek

[johnnyanmac]

Which is on the verge of being renamed to Aylo: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/18/23837670/pornhub-parent-c...

[morkalork]

Interesting, hadn't seen that the CEO stepped down. Rebranding after acquisition to distance themselves a bit from him is a reasonable move. The guy was shady as fuck. Though, the company has a reputation for being a sweatshop in the engineering and video editing departments. I don't thing a rebrand or private equity is going fix that any time soon.

[theideaofcoffee]

I'd be interested to learn more about that, how does that work? Are they subcontractors? Hired directly through that shop? Is that shop owned by outside people or does the tendrils of whoever owns those sites extend there? Such a fascinating, underground world that doesn't see much light.

[zkid18]

Imagine working in an outstaffing company like EPAM or Cognizant, but you only work for a single client. The shop is not owned by outside people and has little interest in having more than one customer.

Come to Cyprus one day, you will get a flavor of undergrad tech of all kinds – gambling, adult tech, betting, etc. All these guys are legally operating in the dark mode and sitting on a ton cash of money without VC support.

[smcin]

> 'flavor of undergrad tech'

'underground'! Very Freudian slip...

[deepspace]

I think, to a large extent, they don't attract decent talent. The sites are barely functional from a monetization POV.

OF, for example, leaves stacks of money on the table by not having a functioning recommender engine. OF artists are almost always discovered and promoted on platforms like Twitter, which DO have finely tuned recommender systems, but it seems like such an inefficient way of going about things.

[ClumsyPilot]

> wow does a company like this recruit good (or at least decent) talent?

Not everyone finds it objectionable, many people don't share prudish views that seem to dominate Chirtian America.

[FfejL]

I don't doubt that. But how do they find candidates? And how do interested engineers find positions?

[johnnyanmac]

Someone else commented above about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37287011

[ploppyploppy]

Not everyone who finds it objectionable is prudish or an American "Chirtian".

I personally find it deeply harmful and a net negative on society and I'm neither of those things.

[akomtu]

What is "it" exactly? Luring users into the pit of addiction, destroying whatever little will they still have?

[deterministic]

You mean the same way alcohol, drugs, sugar, gambling, cheap credit etc. are marketed?

[akomtu]

Prettu much. OF belongs to this list.

[johnnyanmac]

Programming the front end for an adult website is not that much different from any other web development. You will never even watch much "content" at work despite the product you're working on.

I'm sure you can comment about the actors, but given that OF is simply a hosting platform, I assume the GP was talking about hiring developers.

[mistrial9]

I dont think "Chirtian" is a word.

Sex work often involves a lot of drug addicts and negative outcomes for all involved. Those who advocate for it are often not telling their whole story.

[wkat4242]

The negative outcomes are mainly due to societal stigmatization. Which explains the 'not telling the whole story' pretty well too. It's not exactly great dinner conversation.

Drug addiction is not really something that's compatible with adult performing. I'm sure it would correlate with some type of sex work (the cheapest 'street corner trick-turning' comes to mind) but those are not the type of people you'll find on OnlyFans.

I wouldn't be surprised if you find more drug addicts in a high-speed trading floor than the average OnlyFans performer population.

Ps I'm not advocating it as a career option but I know some people are drawn to it and genuinely like it. Reddit is/was full of people doing it for free and I don't think it's a bad idea to try to make a job out of it for those people.

[mistrial9]

> The negative outcomes are mainly due to societal stigmatization

disagree - ordinary citizens often do not get to see the inpatient room at rehab clinics, emergency rooms and court hearings. The fun ends pretty quickly for a lot of people. not making this up "real"

[johnnyanmac]

Are we talking about sex workers or the "War on Drugs"? It's very much established that society and even the government can make certain stereotypes and stigmas stick if they want it to.

[mistrial9]

see you in the rehab center

honestly, no one suggested "make self-harm illegal" here you added that. People can do vice all day and more importantly all night. After you have seen the results a few (dozen) times you might change your mind. Meanwhile, lots of people with active substance abuse habits will chime in quickly about how wrong it is to criticize substance abuse habits.

[ploppyploppy]

> The negative outcomes are mainly due to societal stigmatization. Which explains the 'not telling the whole story' pretty well too. It's not exactly great dinner conversation.

Source please?

> Ps I'm not advocating it as a career option but I know some people are drawn to it and genuinely like it. Reddit is/was full of people doing it for free and I don't think it's a bad idea to try to make a job out of it for those people.

This content, free or not is a net negative on society.

[johnnyanmac]

source on why you don't talk about porn at the dinner table? I don't know, there may be some societal etiquette handbook somewhere.

But for the first part, it's a psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity

specifically the Barnsenian form: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/22415/

>This content, free or not is a net negative on society.

Ehh, Reddit isn't THAT bad. Not compared to Twitter or Facebook, at least.

[wkat4242]

Well the people I generally meet would talk about porn at the dinner table when we go out and many of them publish on OnlyFans too lol :P I also often repair sex toys for my friends.

But I wouldn't imagine this to be a popular topic when meeting up with the in-laws that's all.

[anon25783]

The same is true of lots of kinds of work: finance, healthcare, foodservice, retail, construction... (Especially construction.) The common thread is income inequality and poor protection for workers, not sex.

[mrighele]

[...] often involves a lot of drug addicts and negative outcomes for all involved.

Sounds more like politics to me :-).

[latchkey]

They don't. I worked for kink for 4 years. Before I was hired, they had a guy who wrote terrible PHP code and the site was a mess. We spend a bunch of time rewriting everything from scratch and rebuilding everything in the IT department. We also had a really hard time hiring good people.

After I left, they made a bunch of new hires that completely destroyed all the good work we did, because they didn't understand it.

For example, kink used a lot of top level domains and wanted to have a single login for their customers across all domains. We built a whole SSO implementation, that while complicated, solved the problem amazingly well. Log into any site and you're magically logged into all of them, without needing a server side tracking solution. Well, the new team didn't understand it at all (despite it being well documented), and broke all of it.