The people who are least likely to join in on that have been the older devs but I think the taboo was much more ingrained back when they first started their careers and younger folk are following more out of tradition than an actual strong belief
Additionally, people were pretty much free to set their own work hours (I worked with a great designer who typically left at 4pm, but was never an issue because he always did what was needed - and often went above).
The only possible downside I can think of is that we didn’t really hire a lot of young people (no graduates) so potential for stagnation of ideas (??) however I never saw that have a noticeable effect, and actually at the time the company was quite progressive in its approach to technology.
Our highest ‘executive’ was an interesting mix of someone who could understand and communicate to business, technology and design people.
I’ve often wondered what the secret sauce to this culture was, and how to replicate it...
There have been countless articles that talk about how there isn't a huge pay disparity between men and women in skilled jobs, and articles like The Confidence Gap (Salon) that show that when disparity does occur, it's simply of women not being confident enough to ask for what they deserve.
(On a side note, I hypothesize if you could objectively measure confidence and then compared incomes to confident vs non-confident people in their field, the pay distribution would be low to high among them, regardless of gender. That's difficult theory to prove though).
At larger companies, you have pay grades listed and everyone in Active Directory has a pay grad associated with them (BlueCross orgs are like this). So you can actually look up, within a $8k range, what everyone around you makes, and it pretty much stays accurate until you get up to the VP/board positions.
I wish more companies had transparency on this, but I feel like income transparency is going to stay limited to the public sector.