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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

I would be equally embarrassed if either of those were on my resume. I'd have similar levels of embarrassment with alcohol, firearms, cannabis or politics. You don't want your resume to suggest you are controversial in anyway. Maybe 80% of the people you run across will be cool with it, but it only takes one person in a company to veto your resume and there are usually 3+ people that look at a resume with veto power. It'll close doors for sure.

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Interesting topic because I wouldn't want to work with those 20% who reject people based on n-th level relationship to anything controversial. I get not wanting to deal with people who run these things but employees? Those "anti-political" places typically mean a specific side (depending on your country that may anti-right in western countries and anti-left in eastern).

When I worked in the office before 2019 we had all kinds of people there. It was kind of beautiful in a way. Straight up communists discussing stuff with conservatives without any heat. Isolation breeds extremism.

It's true that it would close doors but man until the market takes that choice away from me I don't want to open those, and I say that as a guy who never worked with any of this even indirectly. And to be fair - not having experience with those things also closes doors, just different ones.

You asked why that would be a problem, not that we agree. I like your point of view but I think in general society is less diverse than our personal experience. At least in my country, which is a mix of very liberal and very conservative (Brazil), most recruiters would discriminate against gambling and porn, not by the other tech people but from the other areas of the company. Less likely to happen in a full tech company.

There's also the issue of money. If you are turned down for a job that would have paid 20% more because of working in a controversial industry that can have a big impact on your life. I'd prefer to be able to have civil discussions about politics with coworkers, but I don't care enough to sacrifice even 1% of my salary. This entire Ask HN is about income maximizing after all. I think getting into vice or anything controversial is a bad long term move, even if it includes a sizable temporary bump in compensation.

> If you are turned down for a job

If you don’t take a job that would pay more you are also hurting your income opportunities. Turning a job down because of some hypothetical problem at some future date isn’t rational imo.

If you genuinely believe certain industries would hurt your future job prospects, you need to quantify the risk. And I have a hard time believing the particular industry would matter at all to an employer. If you can build CRUD apps for a gambling company you can build CRUD apps for a pediatric cancer charity.

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