Just going off my own admittedly limited personal experience combined with the observations of many around me - but we tend to have very limited ability and information to articulate our business value within our own organizations. It's easier to look at the messages in our LinkedIn inbox and see how switching jobs can give us a bigger and better raise than engaging in a socially-awkward conversation about our own worth. But just empirically, I see many coders far more brilliant and hard working than I am languish at low salaries because they actually stick around a company for several years and merely take small raises proposed by management at levels calculated only to avoid insult.
For most programmers I've met it is a "calling" in a certain sense - many of us would be doing these things for fun anyway, you are only really paying us for the 20% of the time that we are really engaged in true drudgery and "Charlie work". I share a sentiment with several other programmer friends that we still can't quite believe we are paid (and paid well) to create things and play with computers all day.
For most programmers I've met it is a "calling" in a certain sense - many of us would be doing these things for fun anyway, you are only really paying us for the 20% of the time that we are really engaged in true drudgery and "Charlie work". I share a sentiment with several other programmer friends that we still can't quite believe we are paid (and paid well) to create things and play with computers all day.