I guess I might be a good example. I wrote software for over a decade and after that time, my salary basically plateaued. Raises stopped. Changing jobs didn’t help anymore. Used to be able to get a 20-40% bump just taking another job—that ends at around the 10 year mark. So I did an MBA and left software development :(

If there was an upward career trajectory for individual contributor developers, I’d go back in a heartbeat, but apart from a very few selective companies there is not. Change this, and we senior folks will return to the industry in droves.