There is a huge amount of insight on this post and I could not upvote this story enough. It is exactly the onboarding process and all the BS/political powerplay and non-productive rhetorics that pass that exact message to a programmer. Multiply this by ten if you happen to be a non-native developer in a mostly ethnic company where your language skills are below native. So -even though it is never clearly said in the open- the message gets to be 'you are just a "foreign" code monkey'.