Just to play devil's advocate, the argument here is that programming is largely commoditized nowadays. A given programmer might build a thing that makes the co

Just to play devil's advocate, the argument here is that programming is largely commoditized nowadays. A given programmer might build a thing that makes the company $10M, but if there are 1000 other people who could also build that thing then really the value isn't so much in the building of that thing, but in the company structure providing the opportunity to build that thing that has a value of $10M. I think this might be a more interesting argument to engage with than the one people seem to be responding to in this thread.