Why Chasing Industry Prestige Costs Us Our Identity

It hasn't been a good month in the job market. HubSpot and Netflix announced layoffs. The movie industry is struggling with downsizing after the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. People who have dedicated their lives to these industries are facing not only the loss of their careers, but the loss of their identity. I understand this deeply, and I want to share my recollections.

The Illusion of Prestige

Careers in media, performing arts, and technology have an allure. At parties, people always want to be around the person from accounts receivable at CNN rather than someone with the same job at a resin supply company. Both jobs require depositing customer checks, but CNN is more interesting because it affects our lives differently than a resin distributor. Plenty of ambitious people want to work for companies in these prestigious industries so they can boast about it. Companies often exploit this kind of cultural currency by underpaying people for the privilege of working in their industry. The unwritten rule is that if you sacrifice and prostrate yourself, you'll eventually get a living wage and career advancement. Often, that promise is false.

From the Airwaves to the Dot-Com Bust

I learned that lesson early, behind a microphone. After college, I was fortunate to land a job at AM 1550 WCSJ in Morris. As someone who learned radio by listening to Top 40 and AOR stations and was steeped in college radio, I wasn't prepared for farm reports and talk radio. I also wasn't prepared to take minimum wage and work overnights and weekends. Soon, I was working a second job to pay for my radio career. After 18 months, broke and exhausted, I did my last radio show and walked away from the media business forever. I gave it my all, but I couldn't justify the financial and personal costs of staying on the air.

I was filled with guilt and shame, convinced I had squandered my career. The truth was, the radio station would never pay me a living wage, and if I wanted stability, I should have done something else. It was a strange place to be at 25. I kicked around in odd jobs—working retail, dealing cards at a casino—before finding my way into technology.

Working in the tech sector before the Dot-Com bubble burst was a giddy, stupid time. Everyone wanted people who could write code and build websites. Corporations paid top dollar, and if you were lucky, you might land at a company that offered stock equity. With a simple IPO and a few lines of code, an engineer could become a millionaire. The work was demanding, requiring an intense focus that often alienated friends and family outside the business. The scarcity of workers made it lucrative and prestigious. You'd brag to your circle that you were a software developer.

After the bubble burst, the survivors were chastened. The money and prestige were often transitory. The fickle nature of software meant you were building the next big thing until the bank closed your startup and sold your office furniture as part of the bankruptcy. The wages were still good, but they often came with instability and anxiety. Big technology companies and consulting firms exploited this environment, saying it was a privilege to work for them and that if you were productive and didn't cause trouble, you would get a living wage, a chance to earn equity, and the prestige that came with the brand. As these new businesses grew and succeeded, people identified with the company. It was an upper-middle-class dream, and your family could brag that you worked for Big Tech.

Reclaiming Our Relevance

Kristine Stewart, on her Substack, pointed out that this wasn't about pride in compensation, but relevance. Coders created wealth-building applications people used daily and kept the global economy spinning. We were building the future while supporting ourselves and our families. The recent wave of cold, impersonal layoffs across many industries, especially technology, has made many of us feel irrelevant. Web developers no longer matter in an age of blockchains and large language models. They cast us aside like used facial tissue, and it stung.

Now people are dealing with lost jobs, prestige, and relevance. It is a breeding ground for resentment and bitterness. What did we do to deserve this kind of rejection? All we did was put in the time and energy to make those companies successful and deliver value to customers. The funny thing is that Large Language Models are exposing something important: the relevance and experience we cultivated over time will matter more as the economy rebounds from this strange patch. While artificial intelligence is powerful, it is also shallow—incapable of replicating the nuanced judgment only seasoned professionals possess.

Until next time.