&gt; <i>I&#x27;d suggest that in most fields, you don&#x27;t make significantly more money until you&#x27;re managing a significant percentage of people, or tasked with making decisions that set the direction the company. Why should programmers be an exception?</i><p>One way of looking at programmers is that they are managers of an extremely cheap, fast, scalable, yet stupid, workforce.  Once that workforce is put into action it can operate indefinitely.  The problem is this workforce is very rigid in what it can do, and it must be told <i>exactly</i> what to do.  It also requires a certain amount of maintenance due to security issues and ecosystem rot, but even so, the fundamental nature of this workforce has completely changed the landscape of the global economy by discovery of a new type of worker neither human nor animal.<p>Looking at it in this light, programmers potentially deserve to be paid on the order of top managers and even entrepreneurs and growth-phase directors.  But not all of them, because being a programmer entails getting lost deep in the weeds of the <i>mechanics</i> of managing this invisible workforce.  So the people who are capable of doing this are not necessarily the type of people who are good at understanding and articulating the business goals.  Furthermore, because of the inscrutability of the work to non-programmers it is very difficult to enforce accountability from the outside, and therefore it is all too easy for programmers to become infatuated with operations that actually yield no value to the greater business.<p>At the end of the day programmers can drive businesses just as management can, but the tools are different.  This is why I believe calling programmers &quot;engineers&quot; is a misnomer—it&#x27;s not because real engineering is harder, but because programming is much more open-ended; a running program is literally logic incarnate.  There is no limit to what can be done with software, but whether that can be harnessed to create a profitable enterprise is another question.