If that was the case I think you might consider keeping a career eye on expanding what your concentration is on as a programmer. I have seen newer programmers doing a terrible to very good job on implementation that is coloring within the lines, but the best could still easily get into the weeds on larger architectural tradeoffs, and communicating them to a team. That kind of experience easily brings in more than 2x the value in avoided costs - but that's the rub, avoided costs are hard for a lot of companies to know how to value.
Edit: If companies want to get positive value from experience, they have to also structure their engineering teams in a way that it puts some technical people in charge at med to high levels - but again many programmers jump to management tracks because that structure often doesn't exist at parity in companies. The roles exist, they just might be called "programmers" at that point..
Edit: If companies want to get positive value from experience, they have to also structure their engineering teams in a way that it puts some technical people in charge at med to high levels - but again many programmers jump to management tracks because that structure often doesn't exist at parity in companies. The roles exist, they just might be called "programmers" at that point..