I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual profitable business.
Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.
The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.
Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.
> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.
I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering.
An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k?
One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engineer who helped solved performance bugs when he was on my team. We were actively using strace weekly to troubleshoot deep process internals to optimize perf.
(Hi Will, I miss you, and you are definitely worth $200k don't listen to this guy. <3)
I wonder how many roles there are like this: low valued because they are low valued, in a vicious cycle. We hire people to fill a prescribed low-value role and don't expect much of them so we don't pay them much and so we don't get much out of them, because we designed the role to be low impact.
If we treat every role as a $200k/yr role, it makes sense that the first thing that would happen is that we find a way to give people leverage to make >$200k of difference in each role! And that's a really exciting proposition from both the employee and customer perspective.
To add: I saw job listings recently posted on bsky and was enjoying how well written they were. The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice. That’s a whole other level of on-call right there.
"Let's remove all fire extinguishers from campus buildings!" vs "We can't appraise extinguishers as worth $50k each quarters", the reasonable PoV must be somewhere inbetween.
I work at Oxide, and support engineering is worth far more than that. It literally means the rest of us don't have to be on customer oncall all the time — I've spent long stretches of my career doing that and it's extraordinarily stressful. Do you know how valuable that can be?
Depends on the business model, cater to high end clients and having a ~1M$/year doctor be the once answering the phone can be a major selling point.
Further you optimize around costs, when having people answer phones is expensive you try a minimize the need for someone to answer a phone. A 5 minute call with someone making 200k is like 8.50$. Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls and that looks cheap.
I don't want to wade too deeply into the argument is a computer support engineer worth 200K USD per year, but this comment really stands out to me:
> Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls
Some of the best software engineers that I have worked with saw every support issue as a chance to fix a bug and/or improve logging/docs. Sometimes they built little tools to do more complex support tasks (update complex config) in moments instead of hours. (Yeah, yeah, I know about this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/)
If I were to guess about Oxide's view of "support engineers": They aren't traditional L1/L2 support. They are essentially software devs who happen to excel at support. As a mentioned earlier, if they respond to a customer call (or email), they might have a quick workaround, then go and fix a bug or update logging/docs.
Loading up this thread I knew this kind of response would be here. Like, I was willing to bet money on it.
Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.
The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.
I imagine they had to introduce variable comp for sales because they weren’t able to hire even a single good enterprise sales rep for a flat $200k. It’s not a culture thing, it’s just the market rate for the role. If they paid a flat $500k they’d stand a better chance of avoiding variable comp.
I find the whole variable comp for sales so bizarre. It’s like people trying to claim that the only way to get decent work out of programmers is by giving them comp on lines of code written.
Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
It's just an industry standard. They are merchants, they could just buy the servers and resell them, so they negotiate a comission/a lower than listing price.
If you actually considet all of the merchants, what's actually uncommon is to be anything other than 100% commission/margin based.
I think of it as "we have a team developing this product, the product makes money, and we use that money to compensate the team". if the team as a whole needs support people in order to do its work, it seems like a great thing to consider those people full-fledged team members deserving of equal compensation.
to the point that their labour does not scale in the same way a software engineer's does - think of the fact that you need more support people to do the amount of revenue generation that fewer devs could do as part of the cost of running the business, rather than as a measure of the fraction of the rewards that should go to them.
No commentary on your latter points about Oxide's compensation structure, but I fundamentally don't share the same sentiment you have about the dynamics of cash flow for venture-backed startups.
Maybe there are still VC-backed companies having catered food, but I think they're by far the exception and not the rule. ZIRP is long over and a decent portion of this generation of startups began in COVID and subsequently don't even have an office. Maybe I'm the one that's in the bubble, but when you take VC money you're on the line to hit growth numbers in a way that you aren't when you bootstrap and can take your time to slowly grow once you've hit ramen profitability.
Having VC money doesn't mean that you can ignore finances. We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN.
> Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward,
Respectfully, I think this attitude is flat-out wrong. Because of this:
> there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.
Directly, sure. But that's the fundamental error. Good support is absolutely worth it, and do bring in value, only indirectly. That customer you kept because when they had an issue, it was resolved quickly and professionally? That's money, even if it's more difficult to quantify than sales. And it's not like support engineers aren't doing engineering as well.
> We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN.
Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.
This reads more like a reflection of how we’ve historically designed support roles than a fundamental truth about them.
Oxide’s approach seems to invert the premise: instead of paying people based on a low-leverage job description, they design roles where every team member is expected to operate at high leverage — including support engineers. That means hiring differently, scoping differently, and building a product that aligns with that structure.
It’s fair to be skeptical of anything cushioned by VC — but skepticism cuts both ways. Just because traditional comp structures haven’t empowered support doesn’t mean they can’t. We’ve seen engineering, design, and even ops roles evolve dramatically when companies raised the bar. Why not support?
> Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.
As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.
> Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.
Can you name a single successful business that reflects your claim? Because I don’t know of any successful sales organizations that don’t pay commission.
You hit the nail on the head re sales being the canary in the coalmine. I just read the original post which I found distasteful and on-brand with Cantrill virtue signaling. Everyone is equal but some people are more equal: some get founder equity and some measly basis points. To boot, founders already made their money from Sun Microsystems looking for retirement entertainment and more than 175 or 200k is gonna be taxes anyway. If they hit it big they’ll be billionaires and their employee number 24 will do as much as if they’d gone to FANG with much stress and liquidity concerns along the way.
To be frank, even if you had a point to make, making outlandish claims about someone else’s personal financial status when I’m willing to bet you know absolutely nothing about it, is pretty distasteful.
And frankly if you don’t like how Cantrill and company structured their compensation incentives, start your own company and do something different?
> One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers.
The easy way to "pay everyone the same amount" when you sorta don't want to is to outsource everything you don't want to pay the same amount for.
Don't want to pay $200k to your receptionists and cleaners? Rent a serviced office and you get their services without them appearing on your payroll.
To a certain extend that is likely what they do. But I don't really think this is bad. Its impossible the force anybody else to have the same compensation model, and its impossible not to work with many, many other companies and people. This applies to many people who make under 200k and many who make over 200k.
So in some sense its a decision of who is one the core of the team and who is in a different kind of relationship. And its fine to have those different kinds or relationships.
At some point the company might be big enough to have somebody doing or organizing cleaning full time, or work reception full time. By that time that person will be valued the same as everybody else.
This make the decision on what to make internal and external very meaningful. And it makes it so that person will be empowered to make the needed changes in order to do their job very well.
Lets see for how long they can keep going with this strategy.
It's possible they're 100% remote with no receptionists or cleaners. Even if they have offices, a surprising number of highly remunerated jobs involve pushing a mop from time to time.
I suppose it depends. Maybe something isn’t worth doing in house. Like for instance if the parts show up unfinished or damaged you don’t pay someone to straighten bent rails, chamfer bolt holes and de-burr surfaces. Maybe you pay the vendor a bit more, find a new vendor, or hire a middleman to bring the parts in ready to ship.
Paying your support staff well is virtue signaling to be sure but as someone who’s always had a soft spot for top shelf QA and support folk, that’s not a bad thing.
Gonna take a positive sentiment on this one - godspeed, oxide! Middle management can often be such a drain on the effectiveness of an organization, that for that reason alone I readily applaud any effort which eliminates at least some layers of it.
Will there be challenges - of course!! What growing business doesn't face challenges? Lots of commenters will argue that your structure won't work for this reason or that... but, what are we comparing to? Most corporate structures don't work either, and are full of crippling amounts of waste. People have just convinced themselves that the usual way of doing things is the only way of doing things.
Apparently, I'm one of the people that would have given feedback on the original proposal :).
> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation.
I think of compensation as total compensation. It would be fine to say this is Oxide's salary model. And I think it's a fine choice.
It sounds like the equity grants are naturally variable, though I doubt it's just newer vs older employees:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
Edit to add: I assume there aren't cash bonuses for salaried employees. (I've always found it a bit weird anyway, but it's not mentioned explicitly, and would seem against the ethos, too)
Variable pay for sales roles is the driver of vast amounts of broken behaviour.
You've seen it it your own companies, but also in the various financial crashes.
It immediately sets everyone's goals in non-coherent directions.
Wonder why your favourite software is getting so crap? Pressure from "sales execs" cos they are getting a bonus for the poorly thought out, inconsistent crappy feature they sold to some enterprise.
> And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone!
This is such a toxic mentality. Yes sales always sits at the end of the value stream, but they aren’t selling thin air. Everyone in the company contributes to making that sale possible. The waiter gets a tip because “everything tasted amazing” but the chef gets stiffed because “he just made it”
As always, they have equality but some are more equal than others. And they are transparent, but obviously not on the parts where transparency would expose the inequality because that wouldn’t be popular.
You can’t hire sales people without a carrot, and the variable component is very much a part of the sales mindset since they are all used to have immediate feedback on their success and have an unshakable belief that they control how much they earn by succumbing to the “gotta catch them all” impulse.
It’s addictive, and, ultimately, far more toxic than what you describe.
Especially if you're doing account manager-type high-touch sales, which I assume Oxide is given its product, it would be difficult to hire strong sales people at all without variable compensation. It's best to think of sales as an entirely different kind of animal as the rest of the company. Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money.
One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Their work and output adapts to their comp schemes in ways nobody else's does. If you cap a salesperson's comp in a quarter, they will work to move sales out of that quarter; exactly what you don't want.
> Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money.
I’ve worked with sales people whose compensation had loopholes you could drive a truck through, make sales that cost us more money than we made on the contract. Now a few of those are good for attracting VC money, but you have to be strategic and I’ve seen too much evidence of them not being so.
If you lock up your biggest potential customers with bad contracts that makes you default dead and no good way to weasel out.
> One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes.
Is that just circular though? i.e. I think everyone's like that, it's just unusual that it's tied directly to compensation. e.g. if I feel that my Jira output is being critically monitored, I might push something (or the reporting of something) into the next sprint if it's close and I've already done a lot in this one; I might more diligently create tickets for every little incidental thing that popped up (rather than just quietly getting it done).
I'm not comp'd according to that, but it's the same behaviour, it's just 'a measure becoming a target' really isn't it?
As others have said, the sales compensation model is fundamentally a low base and then a percentage of the sale. I think Ben Horowitz had an early blog post about not trying to innovate on sales compensation models, and having seen a few attempts at "innovation" at Google Cloud, I agree. It's almost never worth the complexity.
You can figure out various sliding scales, maybe even caps (but adjusting the scale is more rational), but I think flat pay is basically anathema to being a salesperson.
I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap.
You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
> we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC.
Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?
> Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)
Happy to go into it in more detail, but the salient points are in the piece: sales folks are eligible to make more -- but can also make less. This is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere: sales is different from every other company activity in that it is very quantifiable. I don't think that there's a whole lot more to say about it?
"this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..."
For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event.
The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
Sometimes salespeople boost their metrics by promising features that come from other people's work. But they also sometimes provide valuable information on what people are willing to pay for (very different from what they say the want).
Honestly it makes sense and resembles how other companies pay sales people. Lower base salary than other roles in the company for similar years of experience (roughly) but with a commission component that's some percentage of each sale. Commission is a big big part of sales culture that I suspect is hard to eliminate in an effort to be different.
What's interesting is that often times the commission has no cap, so top sales people can take home higher income than even than executives (at least in cash compensation).
But to the commenter's point, true transparency would share the commission % as well :)
Readit News
Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.
The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.
Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.
I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering.
An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k?
One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engineer who helped solved performance bugs when he was on my team. We were actively using strace weekly to troubleshoot deep process internals to optimize perf.
(Hi Will, I miss you, and you are definitely worth $200k don't listen to this guy. <3)
I wonder how many roles there are like this: low valued because they are low valued, in a vicious cycle. We hire people to fill a prescribed low-value role and don't expect much of them so we don't pay them much and so we don't get much out of them, because we designed the role to be low impact.
If we treat every role as a $200k/yr role, it makes sense that the first thing that would happen is that we find a way to give people leverage to make >$200k of difference in each role! And that's a really exciting proposition from both the employee and customer perspective.
I always watch these kinds of discussions on HN with interest, because depending on what is being discussed, one of two viewpoints dominates:
* If we are discussing salaries, of course people deserve compensation, and good work is worth a good salary.
* If we are discussing software cost, HOW DARE THE DEVELOPER ask for subscription pricing, and everything should really be a $5 one-time purchase.
BTW, a very good point in the thread above is that the company is spending VC money.
Further you optimize around costs, when having people answer phones is expensive you try a minimize the need for someone to answer a phone. A 5 minute call with someone making 200k is like 8.50$. Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls and that looks cheap.
If I were to guess about Oxide's view of "support engineers": They aren't traditional L1/L2 support. They are essentially software devs who happen to excel at support. As a mentioned earlier, if they respond to a customer call (or email), they might have a quick workaround, then go and fix a bug or update logging/docs.
Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.
The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.
Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
If you actually considet all of the merchants, what's actually uncommon is to be anything other than 100% commission/margin based.
to the point that their labour does not scale in the same way a software engineer's does - think of the fact that you need more support people to do the amount of revenue generation that fewer devs could do as part of the cost of running the business, rather than as a measure of the fraction of the rewards that should go to them.
Maybe there are still VC-backed companies having catered food, but I think they're by far the exception and not the rule. ZIRP is long over and a decent portion of this generation of startups began in COVID and subsequently don't even have an office. Maybe I'm the one that's in the bubble, but when you take VC money you're on the line to hit growth numbers in a way that you aren't when you bootstrap and can take your time to slowly grow once you've hit ramen profitability.
Having VC money doesn't mean that you can ignore finances. We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN.
> Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward,
Respectfully, I think this attitude is flat-out wrong. Because of this:
> there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.
Directly, sure. But that's the fundamental error. Good support is absolutely worth it, and do bring in value, only indirectly. That customer you kept because when they had an issue, it was resolved quickly and professionally? That's money, even if it's more difficult to quantify than sales. And it's not like support engineers aren't doing engineering as well.
Thank you, Steve.
Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
This reads more like a reflection of how we’ve historically designed support roles than a fundamental truth about them.
Oxide’s approach seems to invert the premise: instead of paying people based on a low-leverage job description, they design roles where every team member is expected to operate at high leverage — including support engineers. That means hiring differently, scoping differently, and building a product that aligns with that structure.
It’s fair to be skeptical of anything cushioned by VC — but skepticism cuts both ways. Just because traditional comp structures haven’t empowered support doesn’t mean they can’t. We’ve seen engineering, design, and even ops roles evolve dramatically when companies raised the bar. Why not support?
self-contradictory statement if there ever was one.
related: have you heard of system administrator appreciation day?
or heard of:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2b4n7a/til_h...
?
Deleted Comment
As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.
Deleted Comment
Can you name a single successful business that reflects your claim? Because I don’t know of any successful sales organizations that don’t pay commission.
And frankly if you don’t like how Cantrill and company structured their compensation incentives, start your own company and do something different?
The easy way to "pay everyone the same amount" when you sorta don't want to is to outsource everything you don't want to pay the same amount for.
Don't want to pay $200k to your receptionists and cleaners? Rent a serviced office and you get their services without them appearing on your payroll.
So in some sense its a decision of who is one the core of the team and who is in a different kind of relationship. And its fine to have those different kinds or relationships.
At some point the company might be big enough to have somebody doing or organizing cleaning full time, or work reception full time. By that time that person will be valued the same as everybody else.
This make the decision on what to make internal and external very meaningful. And it makes it so that person will be empowered to make the needed changes in order to do their job very well.
Lets see for how long they can keep going with this strategy.
Because doing every single thing in-house is a different, more extreme value.
I'd love to be a $207k/mo. lunch lady.
It's possible they're 100% remote with no receptionists or cleaners. Even if they have offices, a surprising number of highly remunerated jobs involve pushing a mop from time to time.
IE; Green-washing[0] and so forth.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
Paying your support staff well is virtue signaling to be sure but as someone who’s always had a soft spot for top shelf QA and support folk, that’s not a bad thing.
Will there be challenges - of course!! What growing business doesn't face challenges? Lots of commenters will argue that your structure won't work for this reason or that... but, what are we comparing to? Most corporate structures don't work either, and are full of crippling amounts of waste. People have just convinced themselves that the usual way of doing things is the only way of doing things.
> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation.
I think of compensation as total compensation. It would be fine to say this is Oxide's salary model. And I think it's a fine choice.
It sounds like the equity grants are naturally variable, though I doubt it's just newer vs older employees:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
Edit to add: I assume there aren't cash bonuses for salaried employees. (I've always found it a bit weird anyway, but it's not mentioned explicitly, and would seem against the ethos, too)
This is such a toxic mentality. Yes sales always sits at the end of the value stream, but they aren’t selling thin air. Everyone in the company contributes to making that sale possible. The waiter gets a tip because “everything tasted amazing” but the chef gets stiffed because “he just made it”
As always, they have equality but some are more equal than others. And they are transparent, but obviously not on the parts where transparency would expose the inequality because that wouldn’t be popular.
It’s addictive, and, ultimately, far more toxic than what you describe.
One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Their work and output adapts to their comp schemes in ways nobody else's does. If you cap a salesperson's comp in a quarter, they will work to move sales out of that quarter; exactly what you don't want.
I’ve worked with sales people whose compensation had loopholes you could drive a truck through, make sales that cost us more money than we made on the contract. Now a few of those are good for attracting VC money, but you have to be strategic and I’ve seen too much evidence of them not being so.
If you lock up your biggest potential customers with bad contracts that makes you default dead and no good way to weasel out.
Is that just circular though? i.e. I think everyone's like that, it's just unusual that it's tied directly to compensation. e.g. if I feel that my Jira output is being critically monitored, I might push something (or the reporting of something) into the next sprint if it's close and I've already done a lot in this one; I might more diligently create tickets for every little incidental thing that popped up (rather than just quietly getting it done).
I'm not comp'd according to that, but it's the same behaviour, it's just 'a measure becoming a target' really isn't it?
You can figure out various sliding scales, maybe even caps (but adjusting the scale is more rational), but I think flat pay is basically anathema to being a salesperson.
Edit: found it, though it isn't from as long ago as I remembered. https://a16z.com/why-must-you-pay-sales-people-commissions/
You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC.
Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?
> Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)
For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event.
The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
Sometimes salespeople boost their metrics by promising features that come from other people's work. But they also sometimes provide valuable information on what people are willing to pay for (very different from what they say the want).
What's interesting is that often times the commission has no cap, so top sales people can take home higher income than even than executives (at least in cash compensation).
But to the commenter's point, true transparency would share the commission % as well :)