Giving away flexibility for free is a collectively dumb move on our part. If someone knows you can take on coding tasks and customer interviewing vs. just coding, you are more valuable to them and they should pay more for it.
They've already gotten away with adding infrastructure and architecture (aka system design) rolled into one developer position. And putting it behind long and stressful interview processes. I'm not doing PM stuff on top of all that and not getting the pay and prestige for it.
Why do you assume it's for free? The compensation of a software engineer varies widely. The same experience can get you anywhere from $100k to $1+m.
Perpetually doing less in fear of not getting paid enough for doing more is how you get paid a pittance while complaining about it constantly. Doing more and then finding a way to get paid more is how you get paid more and be happy.
