If you wanna great salespeople you gotta pay them.
You want great devs. You should put in a ping pong table and give out free soda.
The myth that great developers aren't interested in compensation is terrible for our collective pay.
I honestly think open source has depressed the wages of programmers. Linux probably has generated billions of dollars of value, but it has not really accrued to the programmers. In addition, open source allows companies to get very valuable intellectual property without having to write it themselves or buy it from someone. Basically it devalues the cost of software and there the value of programmers.
Of, say, nonprofit labor-of-love side projects, which they sometimes end up leaving their for-profit CEO gig for, sure I do.
Now I see private and government organizations mandating the use of open source because it's mostly functional and most importantly, it's free (as in beer).
Every single successful business leader I know[1] is a leader at more than just their business. They also sit on charity boards, sit near the top of their social circles etc.
We as devs have to get over this adversarial relationship with other departments. Sales people, business people, accounting, etc. aren't really that different than engineering.
[1]: It's frustrating to me that "CEO" seems to have morphed into a generic term that means "business leader".
I strongly disagree. Linux and many other amazing open source projects have helped build a tremendous amount of software products leading to the incredibly high demand for tech workers we see today. Good open source software lets smaller players enter the game, standing on the shoulders of giants. See: Rails
Do you hang out with many sales people? In my experience, it's a very personality-driven field and they certainly do at least act like sales people outside of work, even if not literally selling a product or service for money.
Those who do are called founders. It sucks, but the reality is that if you aren't an owner, you don't get rewarded.
I think it's down to the incentive structure. Commissions need to be split between sales and earned revenue from prior sales, and the split needs to be just right in order to incentivise building long-term profitable relationships with clients but without making it too easy to just coast on last year's results.
I don't know a huge amount about engineering salaries, but my guess is they're actually pretty similar across the board (although engineers start a lot higher).
I've done sales recruiting for about a year. I've only ever talked to one guy who's made more than $1m in a year. He was on a base of $125 or $150k. Last year he made $750k, and the year before that $1m.
But if you're a rep who's truly making $1m+ a year, you probably aren't planning on jumping ship anytime soon.
It really does not matter what people think. Set your price, hustle and be patient. The price for engineers is set by other engineers who are willing to work for less.