Looking for work elsewhere has a much higher success rate. The vast majority of programming jobs are simply at companies that cannot pay a really high salary for their developers. These companies just aren't big enough or profitable enough per developer to support it. My last job hop was like this, moving from a small company in a market niche to the big leagues. I'm making more now than anyone at my previous company except for maybe the owner. Asking for raises doesn't get you far for most programmers who are working at companies for wages that are roughly appropriate relative to their profitability.

Or to look at it another way, the same programmer with the same skills is going to make more profits if they're working at, say, Amazon, than if they're working on some backend IT system at a regional bank. So the former has correspondingly higher remuneration.