It has been my experience in agencies that designers are often the guys running the show at larger companies, with development often viewed as a commodity that is nice to have in-house, but could be traded away to another agency with little difficulty.

As an example, a guy I know that is now a director at a London based agency is hiring a Head of User Experience/Design, and a Head of Development. The design role requires many years of experience with large brands, leading projects, experience working with board members/multiple stakeholder environments with a salary range from £65-80k a year. The development role requires the same amount of experience as a developer; leading projects and people, but has a salary of £50-65k. This seems fairly common across agencies in London and with the pay scale lowered seems about the same in cities like Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.

A company like Airbnb is going to be entirely different from the norm, but this is already common practice across many other agencies. The rise of Apple has done a lot for creatives, possibly a lot more than the technical might of companies like Microsoft and Google have done for developers.