&gt; <i>Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation.</i><p>This is true of pretty much all engineering jobs, and more broadly, most non-sales jobs. Commission becomes feasible when you can directly attribute sales or billable hours to a specific person.<p>&gt; <i>Initial salaries are good, but there is wage stagnation.</i><p>This is true for all engineering jobs, and also most jobs in general. Banking and consulting are exceptions, and as others have pointed out, the attrition rate is quite high in these fields and that skews the numbers somewhat.<p>&gt; <i>In contrast, 5x or more is not unusual in other fields.</i><p>Care to name some, besides banking and consulting, and possibly corporate law? I&#x27;d suggest that in <i>most</i> 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.<p>Why should programmers be an exception?