a comment on http://coliveira.net/2008/12/why-great-programmers-dont-make-as-much-money-as-soccer-stars/
You write:
"Even if the best programmer in the world is in a team with other 10 average developers, he won’t be able to cope...
"That is the (sad) tale of software development in more than 90% of programming shops. It is not a mystery, then, that being a software manager, especially a good one, pays much more on average than being a good developer."
Let me suggest another hypothesis. The second richest man in the world, much richer than any soccer player, is a programmer. I'm acquainted with a half-dozen or so programmers who have made hundreds of millions of dollars by programming — some have made more than a billion. I've met one guy who worked on his own for about 20 years, on a team by himself, and retired with substantial savings in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Menlo Park. (Peter Deutsch; none of this is a secret. I have no idea how much money he actually has.)
You meet these guys all the time in Silicon Valley, Seattle (where they work for Microsoft), and New York (where they work for investment banks, or did until a few weeks ago). Generally they aren't into flashy cars, big mansions, wild cocaine-filled parties, and trophy wives, so it usually isn't obvious that they have a lot of money.
So I suggest that perhaps your premise is wrong. Programmers do make as much money as soccer stars and rock stars. You just haven't noticed because you live in Brazil, which is a wonderful country with fantastic soccer teams, intelligent and friendly people, and enormous intellectual resources that unaccountably hasn't had very many superstar programmers yet. Maybe they moved to Silicon Valley to work with the other superstar programmers from around the world, and in the 1970s and 1980s it was really hard to get good hardware in Brazil, so you kind of lost a generation of programmers. (Still, how much do you think Red Hat is paying Marcelo Tosatti and Alexandre Oliva? How much do you think they have turned down from IBM and Google?)
It's true that nobody is going to make a billion dollars programming on a team full of bad programmers, but nobody is going to make a million dollars a year playing soccer in the Premier Development League either. In both cases the most talented are going to move on to someplace better, not just so they can get paid more (although they do, because the companies they go to work for make a lot more money per employee), but so they will have a chance to work with better collaborators.
Which means that in the 90% of programming shops you talk about above, you will never meet them.
But they're making a lot more than your manager is. One acquaintance of mine turned down job offers to go work for Google (as a programmer) because their offer of US$120 000 a year was a 40% pay cut from what he was getting paid at an investment bank. He made several million dollars the next year, selling a site he had built in his spare time, over the previous five years or so, to another company.