[patmcc]

>>>All roles help build the company.

This is true, but rightly or wrongly roles are compensated very differently. A successful tech company probably needs programmers, designers, testers, customer support, managers, ops, etc. It would be an odd company (though not necessarily a bad one) that paid all those employees the same. Remember that the wage paid to a person is somewhere between 'what I must pay to hire a decent candidate' and 'how much value they actually add', and usually skews towards the former.