There are programmers that negotiate exactly for the value that their work creates. They own their own business, or they're contractors (which basically amounts to owning your own business). Pick the right industry, have decent communication skills and a track record of delivering projects on time, and you can easily make a half mil a year or so.

When you take an employee position for a quarter of that, a large portion of what you're doing is reapportioning risk. Your employer gets to keep all the surplus value of the work you do - and in exchange, they bear all the risk if the product fails entirely, as many software projects do.