What industry is that? In companies I have seen it's a matter of principle that an engineer can't make as much money as managers. They would lay off the best engineer in the world before giving him as much money as they make.
It's the old class system, an engineer is "blue collar" (no matter where he want to school) and a manager is "white collar".
Of course engineers don't help themselves at all with all the open-source "software should be free" and feel-good "anyone can learn to code" stuff they come out with. If you won't put a cash value on your work, why would they?
I was the founding CTO of a company that did ~$100M in sales it's last year. My top engineers made more in salary than I did. And our top sales people out-earned the CEO and all his staff's take home pay by a quite a bit (except, occasionally the VP of Sales). Which the CEO had no problem with, whatsoever.
If it matters, it was a company that sold software primarily to large banks globally.
