50% raises are a sign of company growth and a competitive market. Once a business is well established, growing slowly, and there are enough developers to go around compensation will settle down.

We're in the first few decades of Internet technology companies. This is the industrial revolution all over again. If you look at the first factory workers in the early-1800s, and the first steam engine engineers, and the first factory production foremen, they were quite well paid relative to other jobs. Later, when rural folk saw what was happening and moved to the cities and mill towns for work, and the supply of workers boomed, the wages stopped growing (and actually fell). The factory owners made hundreds of millions in today's money. They built towns for their workers to live in (Bournville, Rowntree, Port Sunlight here in the UK). Now Google is looking to do the same sort of thing. Its all playing out in a very similar way.

Give it another 20-30 years and things will look very different in tech.

I wish. Where in middle American or whatever you call the equivalent in Britain is Google or any other tech company building towns for their workers?

Nope, Google and the other FAANGs are all still focused on 4-5 large urban areas, almost all of them on the West Coast.

This depends on your org. Also there are individual contributors literally and individual contributors who function like a force multiplier and, although not managing, provide a lot of value beyond just their commits. I’ve seen this with wizard architects and sysadmins who just a percentage of their time is great on a project.

For most people, salary correlates with measurable influence, and there’s nothing more measurable than head count. So maybe you’re right about certain orgs, but I wouldn’t advise any young turks to bet on it.

Basically, every nerd thinks they’re gonna be Jeff Dean...but there’s only one Jeff Dean, and his job is taken.

absolutely this

Just as in how sales people can be on commission but no one puts fifty developers on commission the ability to measure is as important as the metric itself

Most managers don't set their own salary, and are dependent on someone else noticing and respecting their "contribution" (like "headcount" metrics) for their compensation consideration. It is entirely possible to be sidelined as a manager, just as it is anywhere else.

Everyone should have clear, communicated, consistent, meaningful, deliverable, pragmatic metrics that they are subject to in their evaluations.

Jeff was an IC. He no longer is. Under the naive assumptions that many people in this thread are making, that means the IC position he was in should be available.

It's not. I leave why as an exercise to the reader.