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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

>I refuse to accept they are somehow so much smarter than the people actually do the work.

Is a sales person who can close a deal on client worth a $10M contract "smarter" than a principal software engineer at the same company? The capacity to bring in revenue isn't necessarily based on the "smarter" metric.

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And what exactly are they going to sell without the software engineer to build it? I understand the role of sales (even if the vast majority I've had to work with are seedy/liars) and you can flip my statement to say "Well without a sales person it doesn't get sold and the software is effectively useless". I get that, both are needed. That said, the sales position shouldn't bring in multiples of what the engineering position does.

I full understand that's not the way things are done today, I also think we do things pretty terribly today.

Maybe a better way to phrase it is "I refuse to accept that they (CEO) are somehow worth so much more to the company compared to the people that actually do the work", "Smarter" was a bad word to use originally.

Think of it more as supply/demand and marginal revenue.

To simplify - a company should hire more/pay more until the marginal value of that employee < the marginal employee cost.

If the 2nd best option for CEO would result in increased revenue by 1%, and the best option by 3%, then it makes sense to pay up to 2% of revenue to get that better CEO.

Compare that with the best SWE option (in terms of marginal cost vs marginal gain) vs the 2nd best candidate.

Compared to the CEO, the SWE may be far more intelligent, more hardworking, and directly improve the product more. But pay is unfortunately not based on that or any notion of “fairness”

> But pay is unfortunately not based on that or any notion of “fairness”

That’s somewhat the entire purpose of this HN post though.

I understand how we got here, I think it’s stupid and silly. Furthermore I don’t for a second believe that the information exists to actually make the calculations you list. There is literally no way to determine those percentages, it’s all a guess and often a bad guess IMHO.

The fundamental reason why sales people are paid more than the Devs and the CEO more than Sales simply comes out of the difference in the knowledge of how much they know of the product's worth. The Dev never knows that the product would fetch 2000x of how much he is getting paid for creating it, whereas the Sales guy has a better picture. That's why the Dev never asks for that money in return for creating that product and hence he never gets paid that much. The CEO on the other hand, has the complete picture of the cost, profits as well as any changes in market forces that might impact the product, hence taking out 200x the Dev's remuneration, still sparing for the handouts to the other guys.

The model is wrong and outdated. In a healthy model, the sales person and the developer are colleagues and work together for mutual success. This assumes they both have some kind of profit sharing agreement with the company, and clear guidelines on what and how they contribute according to their ability to do so. A cross co-op model can work very very well but usually only in smaller sized companies.

I didn't describe any model at all, so how can my non-existent model be "wrong"?

They didn’t say “your” model, they said “the” model.

Presumably they meant “the prevailing model”, that you partly (accurately, in my view) describe. And by wrong, I guess they just mean “bad” and not what they want, because the rest of the comment describes some hopes and dreams.

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