When I started as a professional developer in 2015, I felt like a panda in a zoo. The elephants received hay shoveled through a hole in the wall while I received hand-picked bamboo and on-call veterinary services.

I had a higher salary than non-developers in the company with a similar seniority to mine. Our team got pizza parties and snacks brought in to the office while other teams had to rely on themselves to bring in donuts. We even got "hack days" where we worked on whatever we found interesting that might tangentially help the company.

This wasn't just the organizations I worked in. Companies across the job boards competed on who had beer on tap and how many ping pong tables were available.

Perhaps pre-Elon Twitter encapsulated this ethos the best, that true developer productivity required a removal of all business constraints and a zen-like invitation to focus (or not if the developer didn't feel in the mood on a given day).

It felt great to be a developer pre-2020. And some good things came out of all that. But I think COVID, the Elon Twitter takeover, and AI coding tools have begun to erode the feeling that giving such preferential treatment to developers is necessary.

Anyway, hay tastes pretty good too.