While I agree that programmers don't ask for more money often enough, this is overly simplified and doesn't account for a lot of cases that are important to a l

While I agree that programmers don't ask for more money often enough, this is overly simplified and doesn't account for a lot of cases that are important to a lot of programmers. Firstly, a lot of work that programmers like to work on really is invisible to pointy-haired types. I run an infrastructure group, and when I do my job well the CEO hears less about my work because there are no problems. It's much more difficult to sell the benefits of never hearing about my code than pointing to changes I made to a website that directly affects conversion rates, or something similar. On a related note, your point 3 assumes that a) the developer wants to change roles and b) that change is going to be to something that can be justified through revenue. Again, there is a lot of work that is interesting to programmers and very valuable to a tech company that doesn't directly drive revenue. These changes are very difficult to sell unless the CEO understands the benefits of these sorts of changes, in which case you probably don't have to sell them anyway. In my personal case, I've gone as far as pointing out that every single thing that our company builds, when deployed, is critically dependent on my code and the code that I am responsible for working - and it does work, every time. It's still amazingly hard to get sales people to value that.