You're coming at the employer relationship from a fundamentally different place than the parent comment you're responding to.
I'm assuming their age because of when Pivotal Labs was a thing, but there was a period from about the late 90s to the early 2010s where many people in the valley believed in an ideal of ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money. It's not like those elements were ever wholly absent, but nominally egalitarian hierarchies weren't the weirdest things in hindsight.
> ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money
And this is not limited to 2010s! My father worked as a software engineer in Poland in the 1960s, and the communist party had a problem: every profession had at least one member of the communist party except the programming profession. But the Polish programmers weren't interested in joining, not even with the perks of a bigger apartment or cars. Finally they got one programmer to join the communist party, but he wasn't interested in programming, and only became a programmer so he could join the communist party & get the perks.
I'm assuming their age because of when Pivotal Labs was a thing, but there was a period from about the late 90s to the early 2010s where many people in the valley believed in an ideal of ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money. It's not like those elements were ever wholly absent, but nominally egalitarian hierarchies weren't the weirdest things in hindsight.