What an enormous echo chamber. I moved from senior dev to sales.
My contract is 100% commission, because it aligns performance with business requirements. Good sales is every bit as difficult as good dev, maybe harder.
The only people who think devs are not well compensated are devs who can't negotiate or are marginal.
If you've never told an interviewer to go fuck themselves over stupid questions or whiteboarding in an interview, you're probably not making an effort.
Try negotiating your salary in a corporation, see how well it works, then attempt censure.
People find it easier to up the salary by moving instead of negotiating and it is not due to lack of skill. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting raises that way. You essentially did that by moving to a managerial job. Some people become contractors to expedite this process.
The whole structures are designed to prevent you from negotiating. From useless reasons to not give one a raise like easy to misinterpret and worthless KPI, through bureaucracy preventing even slightly risky projects, office politics, levels of indirection, use of statistics on personal level etc. Even if you are great you may have real trouble showing that you are. So people hop jobs. When hopping, what matters is the resume and salesmanship indeed.
Only very small companies don't have those bureaucracies and instead they cannot just offer you what they don't have. Unless they have huge VC funding, but that can also evaporate bringing it back to job hopping.
Even measuring the effect of your work is difficult, much less selling it, even less so in a way that bypasses all the layers of junk.
My contract is 100% commission, because it aligns performance with business requirements. Good sales is every bit as difficult as good dev, maybe harder.
The only people who think devs are not well compensated are devs who can't negotiate or are marginal.
If you've never told an interviewer to go fuck themselves over stupid questions or whiteboarding in an interview, you're probably not making an effort.