How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money.

Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before)

Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary)

Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's why you have open source projects right?).

It's much harder to measure the production of "coders."

The challenge from the business side is to evaluate reliably how to measure "10x" in this context. While there is widespread agreement that some programmers are significantly more productive than others (maybe even 10x as productive), there is much less agreement on how, exactly, such productivity is measured.

With sales, it's very easy: you count Dollars In The Door. Maybe you also count something like New Customer Logos Acquired or something like that, but generally speaking it's just cash. The salesperson brought in new marginal cash, and you're paying some portion of that back to him/her.

With code, it's hard to know what to measure: lines of code? Features produced? Ratio of LoC/bugs discovered? Mean time between when a piece of code is written and when we recognize that it needs to be refactored? It's just a much messier process.

None of this is to argue against incentive comp for engineers. It's just to point out that in sales, you're measuring and paying for output. Output is much harder to measure in engineering than it is in sales, and compensation is fuzzier as a result.

This is why IBM created a separate path back in the 1950s so good technical people didn't have to become managers in order to be promoted.

There are many ways to provide leadership, and not every manager leads much.