It depends on which company you talk about. Google and Facebook are not the same employers as Uber and many startups (I know that some startups are good employers). But more importantly, we had a bit of coder shortage locally. It meant that companies were:

a.) Willing to give applicants time to learn and hired them for technologies they did not knew. They hired people who were changing careers. Many position were treated as truly entry level positions, meaning dudes got hired for demonstrating a bit of iq.

b.) People negotiated part time and still had pretty good career. Some people worked long hours, but it was by no means required (ok, you had to be assertive and say no and stand your ground, but in the end nobody could afford to punish you for it).

c.) Nobody cared about things like culture fit (as someone below cares - did you grew in right culture?). They were starved for people doing the work.

d.) I have seen old programmers.

Not all of that was shining, specifically some people should not have been hired. I am not saying it was some heaven on earth awesome in everything for everybody situation. Just that the environment was different.