Then I switched to management path, I found out that although I do only a very limited amount of coding at work right now, I'm enjoying it much more. As an added benefit, I am not mentally tired anymore when I come back home, since at work I only do blah-blah social, blah-blah report, blah-blah management. This leaves me with enough time and energy in the evening to work on really interesting projects for an excellent hourly rate, or on my own hobby stuff. The drawback? I don't watch TV anymore.
As someone else who works with people with self-proclaimed great ideas but are strangely reluctant to put any of these ideas on paper, it's comforting to know there are others out there who have to work amongst such nonsense.
Edit: I'm curious....do you find now that you've made the move to management, have you had to adopt this same "less than honest" culture in order to be accepted within the middle management ranks?
That's the reason. Europe is not really the place for making a fortune. It has the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" mindset, which leads to the fact that starting salaries for software devs (even after a PhD, as in my case), in the country where that motto is official, are within a standard deviation from bus drivers. Magnitude of this varies, but unless you're a no-life breathing for the bonus in a hedge fund, you're not going to earn 10x.
BTW, typically you don't need an accident to know what others are earning. I easily got samples of different pay grades, in different companies in two European countries, just by asking them directly. People are surprisingly open about that.
That makes makes for a good living with many luxuries Germany standard's but those guys are the ones who have to dance in front of the local CEO every week and can't enjoy weekends and work in the afternoon. They can afford sometimes low level luxury cars but for sure they can't stop working and just retire.
For them work developing or implement something is a hobby they can do after a whole day full of meetings.
Not a dream dev life, not a way to become actually rich. And I'd add: not a way to enjoy life (if you hate meetings and empty technical discussions which are not about the technical topic but about a political reason which usually sucks).