[scarface74]

I agree with you, but that’s only part of the story.

There are two ways to make more money in software development. Either take on more responsibility and be a force multiplier or gain skills/experience where the demand outstrips the supply.

During the first part of your career. Gaining experience to make more money without taking more responsibility is pretty easy. After that, you really do have to take on more responsibility or go into consultancy.

[jspiral]

you're right. also, there's a type of responsibility i'm hinting at here that's less formal, more like: "this person can handle tasks of complexity X and is willing to do what it takes to create a quality solution", that is the nuts and bolts to my mind of a successful and high functioning team.

[scarface74]

That’s what happened to me. I left a job as the dev lead at a medium size company with a small development department to work at a small software company where so specifically negotiated not to be a team lead. I told my now manager that I could be a lot more effective working across teams as needed as an IC and just demonstrating and mentoring the team leads who I felt were much more qualified than I was to be a team lead. They knew the software stack and they were all much stronger on the front end than so was. They all needed help with infrastructure and process.

I make more now and have more influence using relationship and expert power than I ever did with the role power I had before - the three levers of power in an organization.