[redleader55]

I'm going to address your TLDR question. In order to get more money, the impact you have in your company needs to be higher. As a manager, you are a multiplier for your team - this is why you get payed more. In order to get that without being a manager, you need to be in a company that allows individual contributors to have independence from the managers, so that ICs can be multipliers for others. Those are usually very big companies, but with a dynamic way of communicating internally - ie. you don't need to go through "gatekeepers" to expand your scope. A place where the manager needs to approve you working on every single task, or a place where engineers report to "project managers" are not that.

Leaving that aside, if you want money go to places where you are on the critical path for the company to make money and become more important to the company by what you are doing there - either solving hard problems, or solving problems that no one wants to touch, or problems that only you know how to solve. The toxic way is to create problems and then solve them; please don't do that, because we have enough of those assholes.

[giantg2]

"the impact you have in your company needs to be higher."

Really just the preceived impact.