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Comment by ericfrenkiel | Hacker News Reader

Sales people earn commission because their work is "non-deterministic," meaning they could execute a perfect sales strategy to win an account but the opportunity could still fall through for circumstances beyond the rep's control (budget is yanked, project is delayed, etc.)

By comparison, an engineer's work is "deterministic" in that is fully under his or her control to complete the goal.

Sales is a risky job and it's compensated accordingly. It doesn't matter if you crushed your numbers 2 quarters ago. It's the reason why there's a saying that a sales rep is always just 6 months out of a job.

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> By comparison, an engineer's work is "deterministic" in that is fully under his or her control to complete the goal.

I hope you don't manage engineers.

Not engineers. Resources.

Having empathy for fields outside your own is exactly why this article is written.

It sounds like you only have a single perspective, which is fine, but having more perspectives would help you move beyond being so rigid in your thinking.

The parent didn't display any rigidity of thinking, they simply criticized your inaccurate characterization of engineering work... a point which your non sequitur reply does not address.

> By comparison...

is the operative phrase.

Your fallacy is conflating engineering work and an individual engineer's scope on said work.

Projects can fail, engineering teams can face delays - all common things. But an individual engineer is very unlikely to lose his/her job over it, in contrast to a sales person missing on his/her quarterly number repeatedly.

The point under contention is whether or not the completion of the project is completely under the engineer's control.

You're backtracking. You claimed an engineer's work is deterministic and fully under his or her control. That may be true for a very limited subset of jobs, where engineers are doing essentially trivial tasks, but more generally, that is false.

Are engineers less likely to be held accountable for missing goals due to external factors? That depends on the organization, but that's an entirely different claim.

> By comparison, an engineer's work is "deterministic" in that is fully under his or her control to complete the goal.

It sounds like you only have a single perspective, which is fine, but having more perspectives would help you move beyond being so rigid in your thinking.

Isn't that an argument not to pay based on deals won? Doesn't that make it a random or unpredictable reward structure, and therefore not very effective?

It really depends on the type of business - if it's a high-volume business, then your proposal is often used by sales organizations. You might call this an "order taking" business - low ASP (average sales price), simple product, etc.

For a low-volume business with high ASP, it's typically a complex product that takes longer to close which introduces some degree of unpredictability, and so a business must compensate the individual with a reward (commission) program reflective of that.

Wouldn't call engineer's work `deterministic` its the least `deterministic` field i've been in.

I don't see see anything which would intuitively suggest that some degree of uncertainty regarding a worker's output would make per-piece payments preferable to a fixed wage in the eyes of the firm. There's such a thing as an uncompensated risk.

I think the whole (non)deterministic thing is off.

Engineers could also execute a perfect development strategy to deliver a product and it could fail through for circumstances beyond engineering team (budget is yanked, project is delayed, etc.)

But I do agree sales is more risky as it is the "last-mile" of the business and they have a target to make, so it's their neck on the line and we live in a system where we reward how much neck someone is sticking out and yet survives, rather than work performed on the backstage. Same thing applies for C-level compensation.

Ooh are we really now. Then why the CEOs and CTOs and especially legals are paid so highly, especially in big companies? They don't risk directly at all. Founders of small companies, sure... If they mess up, the whole company tanks, sure, however they are not paid a commission most of the time.

(Please read The Gervais Principle.)

The "risk vs reward" is not a natural tradeoff. It is an artifact of creating situations driven by elevated risk, which is not always a rational approach.

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