I'm contrary on this. I see salary level as a negative, not a positive. I want to be paid comparably to my peers.

I don't think I'm unique. I think just about all workers want to be paid comparably to their peers. They get upset if they discover others doing the same stuff with the same levels of skill and experience are making more than they are. (And here I mean a lot more, not just "been with the company longer and got regular raises".)

Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the workers labor. And focusing on pay can be misleading. I saw an IT salary comparison a while back. An IT staffer in San Diego might make more than double what a staffer doing the same job in Wheeling, WV made. The reason was simple. It cost far more to live in San Diego. Employers there had to pay far higher salaries so their people could afford to live there. And the chap in WV might actually being doing better, relative to peers in San Diego, because even at half the salary, his living expenses were a lot lower, and more of what he made was disposable income, instead of just covering his rent.

If the salary you make is your main focus, I think you are doing it wrong. Money is a means to an end. Having money lets you buy things you need. Having more money lets you also buy things you want. If all you have is money, you have problems. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. All you can do is exchange it for food, clothing, and shelter.

And if your main focus is salary level, you are like the character played by James Garner in a film called The Wheeler Dealers. Garner was a Texas entrepreneur, buying and selling, being followed around by a breathless female financial analyst trying to understand what he was doing. He stated it very clearly. "It's a game. Money is how you keep score." If that's the game you like to play, you probably shouldn't be in IT.

I had an interchange a while back with a chap elsewhere who was folding a startup that had not proved out. That's the normal outcome for a startup. Most fail. Too many people think "Oh, I'll go work for a startup! I'll put in 90 hour weeks for shit pay. But the startup will succeed and IPO and I'll get filthy rich" No, you won't. Even in a startup that succeeds and IPOs, only the founders are likely to get rich.

If you found a startup, the goal shouldn't be getting rich. You should be doing something you love to do, and will continue to do regardless of whether your startup succeeds and you IPO. If the startup succeeds, you may get filthy rich, but that will be a side effect, and not the point of the exercise. The chap I was talking to agreed completely with my notions.

The OP's complaint wasn't money, it was inability to make a meaningful contribution. The company was too big, with too many little cubbyholes where folks could get tucked away and not have an opportunity to contribute. His challenge was to find another place in the company where he would have an opportunity to make a contribution, or to find another company to work for that would provide the opportunity. If I were him, I might even accept a starting salary that was lower than my current one, simply because I could do stuff that made a contribution, and I saw potential for growth and making more money later.