Pretty much every company I’ve been in or know of values a vertical trajectory instead of a horizontal one for its employees i.e becoming a manager nearly always means a faster salary progression than becoming an expert in one or multiple fields.
Why is expertise valued less?
There are a lot of good comments but there is a bigger reason.
Marketing and negotiation are softer skills that many technical professionals don’t have or appreciate.
Therefore they don’t market themselves properly (make people value their contributions) nor negotiate the best package for themselves.
In my experience, technical people with those skills quickly rise past their non-technical peers.
Most technically minded peoole can study marketing or negotiating and become proficient at it.
Its not hard or complicated, compared to their technical skillset.
But it would be a waste of their time, because their minds can quite literally be put to better uses.
And, it would require them to be ok with lying and being deceptive as a job, so they might have moral objections.
Marketing is literally using psychology to gaslight people into buying things or believing dubious things.
Negotiating is half decorum and half lying, correctly.
Most technically minded people innately work that out very quickly… its not that they don’t appreciate these skills, its that they actively find them disdainful.
Doesn’t seem to bother MBAs or HR or Marketing though, I guess its all relative to them. By which I mean, its relative to them, as in, does this benefit me? If so, its good!
I’m retired from a technical field. I know lots of folks that hold this opinion.
I have also seen excellent technologies and fortunes wasted because technological experts thought that marketing and finance weren’t important. They thought that because their technology was better than anything else, people would want it.
People are busy. Marketing is required to give people a chance to understand what they might get if they spend their time and money on your product.
Finance and leadership are needed to build and fund the human machine that is the company producing the product.
I’m also retired from a technical field, and I did bother to learn how to analogize and narrativize and graphically display many of the complex and technical things I often needed to convey to people that didn’t have my skillset.
Nothing I said is false.
I didn’t say marketing wasn’t important to a business.
I just said I find it fundamentally disdainful, the same way I would find a chemist who specifically only develops neurotoxins disdainful.
Yet, sometimes, in some contexts, necessary.
Finance? I didn’t knock finance. Finance is very often highly intensive with complex math and series of complex rulesets.
I often find finance disdainful, because often, finance just uses their extremely complex skillset to functionally lie via statistics.
Anyway, yeah finance is needed.
‘Leadership’?
Do you mean, ‘owners’?
Or do you mean people with actual team leading and decision making skills, who have a solid and broad sense of responsibility to employees and consumers, and ability to own their own mistakes?
Because in my experience, ‘leadership’ in most complex and large organizations display the exact opposite qualities as those.
They aren’t held back by the org that limits technical salaries and request that they take on leadership responsibilities?
If you have those skills, you can apply them to yourself. You can make people value your contributions enough to pay you for them. You can convince people to give you the chance to make larger contributions to the company.
If you can get that kind of experience and are technical enough to identify an emerging idea, you can convince a banker or investor to help you start a business.
The company is not paying you for the amount of expertise. It is paying for how much money you will make them. If you limit your work to only what you can do yourself (without leading others), then you have deminishing returns. Only because I can now solve very complex problems because of my expertise, I cannot do 10x the work. Time is limited, expertise won’t bring you more of it. Leading will help other do their work better and faster, so you will be more valuable with that.
An org that limits individual contributor salaries loses it’s individual contributors to companies that don’t. Senior principal engineers and principal engineers frequently make VP and Senior VP level salaries. If they aren’t, the talent leaves.