I've always been a bit confused and frustrated by this job categorization. Someone good on CS can easily have a stronger effect on contract retention than the flashy sales folks - and all of our jobs are performance oriented, it's just a question of being fired vs. keeping our jobs instead of the magnitude of bonus.
If Alice in sales lands a client by showing off a shiny new dashboard which Bob the programmer built, obviously they both had to perform. But it's fairly easy to run the counterfactual Alice: if Carol didn't land a similar client with the same dashboard, Alice is adding more value. (At least over large sample sizes.) It's very hard to run the counterfactual for Bob: would a worse dashboard have lost Alice's client? Would a better one have landed Carol's? Would another programmer have built something better or worse, in more time or less? Since you only want one of that dashboard, those things are exceedingly hard to answer.
Notably, some companies with consulting/deployed engineers do pay bonuses, because like a physical craftsman they're building many client-specific products. If one person's dashboards consistently land contract extensions than another's they're probably performing better.
(Of course, nothing is ever this clear or easy. If Alice just gets better clients, Glengarry Glen Ross style, Alice didn't actually sell better. If Alice promises a dashboard that doesn't exist yet, leaving Bob too busy to fulfill Carol's client's requests, that's not better either. And at Wall Street is infamously asymmetric, rewarding risk taking rather than actual performance.)
but more genuinely i do think sales does bring more value. customers aren't rational actors so closing a deal isn't about features or stats or whatever material a software dev contributes. it's about value prop and trust and meeting needs and all the language sales people use.
[1] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
I just wonder if there is some way to counter that effectively and also probably couple that with taxation and service provision to make it so that someone working hard at a dying company has a chance at a decent life compared to someone doing nothing at a successful company that gets a wealthy life due to happenstance.
It's interesting to me that the income security of a non-commissioned job is sort of a trade off against profit sharing - where one extreme can leave a hard worker destitute and the other extreme can leave a lazy worker wealthy.
It's a cop out for the sales team to point and say "we made the sale, we're itemizing the value as ours when the whole possibility of the sale is made by the team.
This is why I like an RSU component as an engineer. If our value goes up, I expect to see some of it.
If there is no equity upside, engineers should stop working for bankers.
So maybe "The sales man gets the glory, but if the bad comes they don't get quite as much." is a more accurate statement.