That's pretty spot-on in my experience. Executives and directors keep trying to de-humanize developers in order to make themselves feel OK exploiting people who are as intelligent or in some cases more intelligent than they are. They don't want to face the fact that they are in their current position as directors only because they were born in a privileged position and that's the only thing which differentiates them from the developers they exploit.

George Carlin said that the elites want citizens who are "Just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to accept their situation."

But these days, there is nothing 'dumb' about people accepting their situation. This is because there is no legal alternative to accepting one's situation. All the legal options of getting out of a bad financial situation through legitimate entrepreneurship have been made almost impossible by corporate monopolies.

So in reality, what differentiates developers from directors today is either birth privilege or capacity for fraud.