Maybe I'm just getting old.
The perks are the claim to status. At the same time many people's choice of perks is a bit infantilising, which confuses people outside it.
(There is another, nastier kind of "perk" in many jobs which a few developers indulge in, which is the freedom to abuse lower status staff without real reproach.)
Software dev is weird. Mostly sneered at or patronized by those up the hierarchy, yet paid really well. Not especially well-regarded outside business hierarchies considering how high the comp is, in no small part due to its acquisition, deserved or not, of a reputation for being a He-Man Woman Haters' club, and also, you know, for being generally nerdy (which was entirely the historical reason for its being low on the social status ladder, until relatively recently).
Garbage collectors fit this description in every city I've lived in.
https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Waste%20Collector&l=Austin%2C%...
That was one of the first results, but it seems like the average is generally lower, around $15 an hour. My first tech job was as a Linux sysadmin in a web hosting company in Houston circa 2011, which paid 17 an hour.
This was with no formal education or experience (I'd played around with Linux at home and wanted to work with it professionally). So I'd say the claim that garbage collectors make the same as programmers appears to be generally untrue.
This is wrong and revisionist to boot. You're projecting your own biases or poor experiences on an entire industry.
Management looks down on programmers because they are not management. When one has real power and status it's easy to look down on others.
Or we could fix the culture problem.
I went to the doctor and got drugs and vitamins. One of the drugs was supposed to be for erectile dysfunction, but had the side effect of keeping people awake. I tried it anyhow. They didn't work.
I ended up drinking a little caffeine to fix it. It worked really well.
Now I drink a lot of caffeine to fix it, and if I stop, I go back to falling asleep in the middle of the day.
If I could, I'd gladly just take a nap in the middle of the day to "fix" this problem. I get plenty of sleep at night, and I have a regular schedule. I don't work overtime and my job isn't abusive on my work-life balance.
But now I just need caffeine to keep going all day. And so I deal with that instead, and I no longer tell people that I don't like caffeine.
When someone says that they need caffeine to wake up, I certainly don't tell them that they should get off caffeine... And I don't even think it anymore. They might actually need it.
Something you may want to look into is how many carbs you are eating for lunch, and whether your blood sugar is being affected. An amazing number of people have minor hypoglycemia and a carb-heavy lunch can leave them falling asleep at their desk. When I switched to a low/no-carb breakfast/lunch it did help (tho did not cure).
That said, you've made me think and it's worth seeing if I can't further move my intake towards proteins safely and cost-effectively. And then maybe next time I try to reduce caffeine, it'll actually work.
Thanks!
The most interesting aspect is that this acceptance is near universe across cultures.
It's a piece of infrastructure. It may not seem like 20% pay cut, but it might very well be bleeding out 20%+ of productivity of the floor until the problem is fixed or people find workarounds. Same with network issues or outage, or crappy work hardware.
At the same time I worked in a support department where getting one lunch of garbage quality pizza every quarter was seen as "too expensive", so they cut that.... so I also chuckle at other developers when they complain about their mountain of perks.
I think many really don't realize that most people don't get, squat outside of a place to go work.