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

Don’t worry, you’re going to be unceremoniously rejected by so many tech jobs regardless of your work history

I was at one for a handful of months. It was way grosser than I imagined it would be.

This one also happened to be a subsidiary of a major far-right media organization, which didn’t help, but the gambling arm per se was totally disgusting.

I now know I couldn’t work on ads at any major company, too. Same kind of harmful optimization dynamic.

(Incidentally, as I was able to gather, a great deal of money in sports generally but almost all of it in esports is connected to gambling. So, there’s that)

> I am concerned about the ethics of the industry itself

You have a moral problem working with gambling.

Decide for yourself if that's what you want to do.

And don't care what other people say.

> and worry that having something like this in my CV could hurt me

It arguably makes your CV less neutral.

It might hurt some opportunities, it might improve some, and for a lot it won't make a difference.

Just don't do something you will personally regret or feel the need to hide.

> Would you hire somebody who worked on gambling/betting systems?

Yes.

Many years ago I asked a new colleague what he used to do before joining, and he said "Oh, I used to work for a gay porn site."

I bet that made him a better programmer, considering the high traffic.

I liked him better for his approach to honesty.

Some might have liked him less because of the porn.

Standing by your choices filters away the people who won't like you anyways.

it's kind of interesting how i have started to look differently at ex-FAANG employees compared to how I used to view them only like 3 years ago. For me, it's less about someone's morals because look, if you're going to get paid 500k--there are very few people in the world that wouldn't take that. It's more about the fact that after reading Blind, the culture behind FAANG just turns me off so much. The optimizing your entire existence around TC, the musical chair company jumping just to increase said TC, working just barely enough to avoid PIP while delivering near zero. It's become so soulless and cringe that I can't view FAANG as the upper echelon of engineering anymore. I understand you killed it at leetcode and system design and you're probably very smart, truly I do. But I really just don't want to work with those types of folks. I'd rather work with slightly "worse" engineers that maybe couldn't hack the leetcode grind or chose not to and instead shipped a bajillion features at startups/mid tier companies that are actually normal, fun humans.

Having worked 10 years in betting companies, I sure hope not. There is vast protection and regulation for customers. Especially in the UK. Some companies where I worked earlier in my career were a lot more predatory to customers. That included a company that did those 4 euros a week scams for wallpapers and ringtone that were legal in Europe back in 2009, and a company that had previously been an iteration of Lehman Brothers. Either of those were way worse than a betting company. I was 20yo and had no idea what they were before joining. Left both in less than a year.