Ask HN: Does having a betting/gambling company in your CV hurt your career?

On the CV side: no. Gambling is heavy statistical analysis, a lot of regulatory-compliance work, and no small amount of human behavior work. It's a challenging space that any competent future employer will recognize as a place where you wear a lot of hats and learn a lot of transferrable practical skills in those three mentioned spaces. Nobody who would be willing to hire a former Boeing, Raytheon, Facebook, Google, Pornhub, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, SpaceX, Tesla, Baidu, Amazon, Alibaba, Morgan Stanley, or Palantir employee is going to bat an eye on you having Fanduel or whatever on your résumé.

They care about the skills you can bring to them today, not how you got them.

On the moral side: that's the one you're going to have to decide for yourself. As other commenters have said: other people can tell you their morals, and you can collect facts about the industry, but it's your compass that'll tell you whether you can sleep okay at night working in that industry.

My father spent most of his career doing systems work for a major tobacco company. He was able to make enough money doing it to support his family extremely well. It does, sometimes, keep him up at night whether securing the future of his children was worth indirectly contributing to the premature unmaking of so many other families.

Life has not handed him an answer to that question. How much you care about your own system of ethics, how much personal integrity you choose to maintain, and how many compromises you're willing to make to trade one negative for another positive is up to you.

(It is perhaps also worth noting that no answer is set in stone. Google was seen as a savior-factory about a decade ago. I have relatives who will tell me about the Bad Old Days of computing before Microsoft reigned in the chaos by clear-cutting the massively-incompatible diversity of choice in favor of an ecosystem that worked with itself. And IBM's rise and fall from grace are industry legend. This isn't a question you ask yourself once; it's a question you'll keep asking yourself your whole career.)

But there are also big problems in social media companies. Would they harm your CV? The dark patterns in these might be even bigger problem than in gambling. The audience is much larger.

I know many great people who work there and I think no less of them. People are allowed to make different decisions and we should respect that.

Similar, when involved in hiring decisions, it's the tech/culture fit that's important.

As stated above, it's probably more important you are comfortable with it, than anyone else. That might also involve considering your own personal situation and what other opportunities are available.

Every time I’ve met with ex-FAANG types in the last decade (and I’ve got dozens of anecdotes) I felt like I was talking with a Wolf of Wallstreet bro stereotype. Complete lack of humility / big ego.

The big name and big money attracts a certain personality type.

I realize full well this is broad strokes and not all are bad, but there’s a bias in the population pool.

I have no idea how much the details of my coworker’s situation was due to the industry or the specific company circumstances, but from other rumors I’ve heard around gambling, it might be wise to do some research around other potential ramifications of being assiciated with the industry.

Also, as to your question. I’ve worked now with 3 people with who’ve worked with various gambling resume points, and I didn’t get the impression that it effected their job searches. And, for what it’s worth, they all happened to be better than average coworkers.