1. they don't hire often & usually have small teams
2. they make so much money, that they don't make noise about it. & you won't hear about them, unless one day you randomly run into one of their employees saying they're hiring on reddit / hn
3. they work in unsexy industries or high risk stuff e.g gambling
4. they're usually located in places you wouldn't expect
Same. I'm 40, and I have a wife and child. I will absolutely give up those rock star salaries if it means having the time to spend with them, and not taking ulcer medication.
Really interesting how this is viewed in different countries.
How far does this go? Does this include Gacha game devs? How about people working on loot boxes in gaming (like finance/marketing people who come up with new boxes)?
Or NFTs or crypto in general?
I wouldn't even thought to think about people coming from gambling companies differently.
I live close to a city with a bunch of gambling companies and yeah, devs at those companies are definitely judged for their choices, similar to people who work for crypto / NFT companies. It has a reputational risk similar to working for porn companies (but less severe).
Capitalist societies where the alternative to employment is destitution can force people into working at huge online gambling companies due to the need for employment and their responsibility (kids, aging parents, etc)
While I agree in an ideal world, individuals should all stand up against unethical employment options, I am also mature enough to know not to penalise someone who might be otherwise meritorious based on what could be situational.
We should take a stand against predatory companies that attack the vulnerable, but this should be done at a government level, not an individual employee level, because it’s a much more efficient utilisation of resources for a large organisation with teeth to be subdued by another large organisation with teeth.
I would hire someone who used to be in gambling (if they were a good fit culturally and technically of course) because that would take a skilled developer OUT of the gambling industry, implying that you shouldn’t hire someone who used to work in gambling is a sure way to make sure that predatory industry keeps enough developers to keep shirking the poor
People can absolutely be forced into working immoral jobs by muh capitalism, but some of you are way too enthusiastic about it. Someone doing blue team work for MGM after getting laid off in 2022 is one thing, a Staff Addiction Engineer looking to try a new industry in 2019 is another completely. Secondly, I agree that we should be hiring good people out of these industries, but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
> but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
Actual LOL - who? I’ve worked at enormous orgs, Google, to medium sized orgs, to startups over my 20 year career, as a senior dev, engineering lead, CTO and now founder, I have hired and mentored hundreds, maybe close to 1000 engineers, hiring managers, project managers, and this has never ever been an issue, in one case we hired 20 engineers from Betsson, a huge (~400M/y) gambling company in Malta into a much larger organisation (non-gambling), and nobody from senior management, middle management or engineers ever even raised this point.
I think you are uncomfortable with it, and are projecting that starry-eyed wishful and naive thinking onto others by saying “a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with that”
I have 20 years experience working in 9 different countries, all with very different cultures, that says otherwise, nobody has ever mentioned it.
I've seen it on HN (phpnode said as much just in this same thread), I've heard people say it in person at meetups and cons, and I've had other interviewers discuss it after interviews. Maybe people aren't willing to discuss concerns like that with you.
I would be worried about organized crime. All sorts of sketchy things go on. The only sports event at my Uni where I wasn't able to photograph was college tennis because they have a problem with people past-posting on college tennis:
On one level I can understand the thrill of having some money riding on a game but I am baffled by the prop bets. Fixing a whole game is not so easy and rather risky, but influencing the silly little events some people bet on looks easy and hard to stop. It's particularly crazy that people bet on decisions by individuals and small groups as opposed to the outcome of a contest.
Gambling itself is sketchy but legally hired employees especially developer-level have to be somehow protected from the decisions of the business, no?
Unless you're worried about the crime itself (as in somebody might threaten you personally and send you to a hospital kind of thing) and not prosecution.
Crime, criminals. Mostly organized crime, but the occasional whack jobs who “just need an edge”. Doesn’t matter where you are in the organizational hierarchy, I’d argue the most at risk are the lowest level employees.
Then what is? I know the higher ups / owners have to deal with some straight up mafia shit or money laundering but a gambling company doesn't really look bad on a CV the way porn industry or even a government job (at least here in Poland) does.
Maybe it's a country thing but here in Poland no one would care.
Various forms of gambling are legal under supervision of authorities so legal companies exist around that.
Unlike porn it wouldn't really be an embarrassing topic on an interview.
Lots of interesting technical stuff to deal with in such a job.
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.
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 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.
Funny I worked for a place that, before I was there, was a major vendor of search engines for the porn industry despite the owner being a conservative mutual fund manager. (e.g. I had a poster for an ETN I liked on the wall of my office and it got taken down before he visited)
I know things went bad and I had something in my contract that I'd be immediately dismissed if I was found to have pornography on my laptop or any other computer belonging to the company.
1. they don't hire often & usually have small teams 2. they make so much money, that they don't make noise about it. & you won't hear about them, unless one day you randomly run into one of their employees saying they're hiring on reddit / hn 3. they work in unsexy industries or high risk stuff e.g gambling 4. they're usually located in places you wouldn't expect