There's nothing wrong with the word career. Your career is basically the work you do over the course of your life.

As you work, you gain experience and skills that are more valuable. These skills are often specialized to some degree and support each other, tending to make you most valuable for certain kinds of work. As a result you will do a lot of that work. That's a career.

Whether you make a career out of starting tech companies or fixing pipe organs the word fits. In fact, you might start one career as a software developer and then decide to quit and run a nightclub instead. That'd be your career even if you technically had FU money and weren't doing it for anyone but yourself.

So, the question he is asking when he says "will a job in gay porn kill my career" is: will the skills and experience I have gained become worthless in other markets? Career is a flexible English word and takes on additional meaning easily. You can avoid it all you want, but that won't change the realities about how much his experience is worth to potential employers.

I believe that you are ultimately correct about the word 'career' in your well-written post, but the narrow way that it's constantly used in Corpspeak has generally ruined its meaning in that more broader sense.

When I encounter the word career it's almost always paired with 'climbing that career ladder', with the implied 'toe that line as a dedicated corporate soldier or your career is finished'.

It's a sad state of affairs that those with over-simplistic attitudes and an ultra-conservative agenda have seemingly hijacked such a fine word. What to do if your self-described 'career path' doesn't sit well with the pointy-hair's idea of a proper 'career'?

I'm feeling that the word is tainted among the more thoughtful and enlightened and it's better to just not use it at all, lest one risk coming across as a Philistinistic simpleton.

While I haven't worked on an adult site, I did work on a site that, by the end, I was embarrassed to be working on. It was borderline scammy and I didn't believe in it at all. I worked on it for about 6 months before finally leaving - mainly because when I was hired for the position, I was given the impression that there would be a whole slew of different projects.

The bottom line is that I was so embarrassed that I worked on this app that I don't list it in my online portfolio. On my CV, I just list a vague description of the duties I performed at that company without specific reference to the project.

If someone asks me about specifics, I will tell them about it - in fact, one interview I had asked me about the worst project I worked on and I talked about that one. So I don't hide it if asked.

I do wish that I had worked on something that I could be proud of for those six months though.

I guess that is the question you need to ask yourself. Is working on this something you can be proud of?

Don't worry what other people will think. Ask yourself how you will feel about it. If you have no problems with it, then go ahead.

I disagree with this. You want to go after roads that give you greater option value. Adult industry is not a career killer per se, but provides you less option value in terms of industry experience (for example, Linkedin provided the insight to go into FB for Matt Cohler).