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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Are you comfortable with sharing what are the main tech stacks in there? PHP, Ruby, Python, something else? Which frameworks?

As an example of something I heard at least a year ago back here in HN: I get it that PHP can be secure and fast but that requires a lot of extra effort and I'd bet most sites don't want their programmers to work more because they will have to pay more?

(I am skeptical if porn sites even keep fulltime programmers on a wage; I'd bet they just hire them periodically.)

...Or am I missing something very obvious here and talking uninformed? I am curious.

I am not asking about site names or anything identifiable; just the tech side of things.

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Lots of php mostly. A bit of node. We use python but we are small players.

The fun thing is more about the db. E.g some go full in memory redis while others stay on a good old mysql.

Although, don't let yourself fooled by the poor ui. It doesn't reflect the tech behind, and is now mostly ugly for marketting reasons.

Big sites makes millions and of course have full time dev team. They need to innovate constantly. E.g provide best moments on the player timeline, add face recognition to categorize actors, buff the infra for live cams, etc.

However, very few use the cloud. It's mostly home made. Video streaming is expensive, and you can divide your costs by 10 by avoiding aws and cie.

They are smart for using their own metal. I am still waiting the world at large to recognize the fact that the popular cloud services are not actually cost-efficient at all.

I sometimes wondered if I should try and work in the area; these people seem to constantly have to do stuff better and better which is an appealing aspect for me and keeps me from being bored. And as more and more time passes, I don't care for societal approval. Plus I never viewed porn as a "sin" or whatever.

Thank you.

Also, are you folks open to something newer in terms of stacks? Something much more efficient and fast out of the box, like Go or Erlang/Elixir? Is the legacy too big for a code reorganization to ever be viable?

Even though parent is true, don't get the picture that it's just PHP/MySQL. I've seen and written Lua code on top of Openresty for a custom CDN authorization layer fe. Also Node is getting more and more common.

The problem with Go and the like is that you shoot yourself in the foot regarding recruiting. An exotic tech stack really narrows the already small pool of people willing to work for an adult company.

I understand that the adult companies' hiring pool is even smaller and I recognize it as a legitimate business problem to worry about.

But aren't these companies of the kind that like to nurture employees as a result? Namely good social programs, maybe some free food, some advertise good parties (wtf?) or maybe none of these -- just a promise for job stability and having a friendly and outgoing team and a "family"-like environment overall.

Regarding parties: I watched a video years ago when 2 of an adult site's programmers went to a company party and they were very pampered, including voluntary flirting and sex by some of the porn stars (that was a bit weird but also kind of hot). While as a very happily taken man I don't care about such activities in company parties one bit, this is one of the examples of a smaller community that has tighter bonds and (overly) friendly atmosphere.

I mean, not everybody is obsessed by growth and being able to replace humans as nuts and bolts in a machine, after all.

You might appreciate the Quora answer I wrote about life at Kink.com:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-on-the-develop...

Thank you, it was an interesting read. Guess it really depends on the company then...

Thanks for the link. Is it possible to contact you via mail to ask a few questions? Thanks again.

Ditto. I'm still curious about other things related to employment at such places.

I believe the biggest player is MindGeek and they have a lot of open positions in various locations [0]. Technologies include Go, PHP, .Net, JS (React) and there are lots of DevOps positions too.

[0] https://www.mindgeek.com/careers/

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