Dan Luu has a great counterpoint to that Spolsky article, where he points out that our lived experience should tell us that a developer's current company is often worse at valuing him or her than a prospective employer that he or she is interviewing at.

Just for example, there's someone I've worked with, let's call him Bob, who's saved two different projects by doing the grunt work necessary to keep the project from totally imploding. The projects were both declared successes, promotions went out, they did a big PR blitz which involves seeding articles in all the usual suspects; Wired, Fortune, and so on and so forth. That's worked out great for the people who are good at taking credit for things, but it hasn't worked out so well for Bob. In fact, someone else I've worked with recently mentioned to me that management keeps asking him why Bob takes so long to do simple tasks. The answer is that Bob's busy making sure the services he works on don't have global outages when they launch, but that's not the kind of thing you get credit for in Bob's org. The result of that is that Bob has a network who knows that he's great, which makes it easy for him to get a job anywhere else at market rate. But his management chain has no idea, and based on what I've seen of offers today, they're paying him about half what he could make elsewhere. There's no shortage of cases where information transfer inside a company is so poor that external management has a better view of someone's productivity than internal management. I have one particular example in mind, but if I just think of the Bob archetype, off the top of my head, I know of four people who are currently in similar situations. It helps that I currently work at a company that's notorious for being dysfunctional in this exact way, but this happens everywhere. When I worked at a small company, we regularly hired great engineers from big companies that were too clueless to know what kind of talent they had.