I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent amount of undifferentiated code slinging.
Sure. If application of your code a) demonstrably makes a business more money at the margin and b) you are sophisticated about extracting that value, the amount of money transferred from the business to you will not be judged against the programmer pay yardstick, it will be judged against ROI on strategic initiatives yardstick. You really want to be paid according to that second one.
There are many examples of this. Quants. People who do risk pricing for Citibank. The kind of people who work on credit score algorithms. There are comparative peons in Google/Facebook/Zynga who will make millions upon millions because they are really good at twirling a few knobs which are attached to a faucet that spits out money.
Last March I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. For that my employers paid me $3,000. This May I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. I made a wee bit more than $3,000 this time, largely because the punch line was "Project partly successful, sales up N%."
No - basically, have your contribution be measured in how much value you added to the business. EX: App redesign makes sales go up 10k then the work was worth 10k
