[dasil003]

I love this comment, but it's not the whole story. Mark Zuckerberg made his billions because he built his own company. Musicians do not necessarily need to do this (although it helps them avoid getting screwed), why does Ozzy Osbourne make bank working for other people? Because his value is readily identifiable. You can see his ticket and album sales and TV ratings right in front of you. Everyone can watch his act and evaluate it.

The problem for programmers are that their talent is extremely difficult to evaluate. The best programmers will build a system that avoided so many problems which management will never even have a clue could have happened. Meanwhile, a "rock star" might come in and bang out a prototype that looks so slick and is complete in such a short time that management thinks he is god's gift to programming even if under the hood the code is unintelligible and unmaintainable; when phase two modifications are a disaster, the blame could fall to the new programmer who is objectively much better but is saddled with a terrible technical debt that no one knew about.

It's a classic market for lemons. So management is constantly worried that they have lemons. Giving space for creativity would be much more of a possibility if it was easier to identify the programmers who deserved it.