07/09/2025
“If you have a pulse, you’ve got a job”.
People used to say this all the time during the wild days of the dot-com boom in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Back then, startups were popping up like crazy, flush with venture capital and ready to hire anyone who could write code, even something as simple as HTML, or just knew how to use a computer. Attracting eyeballs first was the business plan; the rest would get figured out later. So the joke was: if you were alive and breathing, you were practically guaranteed a job offer.
I took this picture while on assignment for a magazine story about Listen.com and was surprised by what this person was working on. His job was to listen to music all day and tag it “Rock, Classic, Punk, Pop, etc.” to feed the database. That was it! I was told he earned over $ 60,000 a year, a fairly good salary at the time. That was 25 years ago
