I was a trader at an investment bank's prop desk. My salary was $200k+bonus when I was 20. When I left a year later I was offered 350+150 guaranteed minimum bonus to stay. But I built algorithms from concept, testing, all the way through to design.

I had a team of coders and optimisers working for me whose salaries topped off at 150 all in, 200 for the one who could turn out assembly that ran in milliseconds.

I always saw my job as being finding in-efficiencies and irrationalities; they saw it as coding. I happened to code (and not all that brilliantly, hence the support). But the argument that pure developers should be compensated richly doesn't gel with the argument that programming is the new literacy.