He lost me here. Something I've always loved about being an engineer (and now in product) is that something small we do/tweak can have big impact.
If you tuned a parameter and that actually had tangible impact on the business, that's like the best case scenario and should be celebrated (vs doing some cool rocket science stuff that ends up unused and doesn't matter)
If you want to really follow the same compensation structure, we would then give engineers a really low base salary and make 80% of their compensation performance dependent.
Be careful what you wish for :)
Besides - this would drive some strange incentive structures. If you incentivise people based on cloud savings for instance, it will really only be the teams with unnecessarily large cloud spend in the first place that ‘get’ that bonus. If you incentivise on sales, engineers doing great work on back office tools don’t get any cake. Etc.
Maybe you are on $150k per year today, but in three months time you are back to $45k per year because you didn’t make some minimum sales threshold. Might be fine for some people, but depending on your mortgage…
I very much doubt my "going the extra mile" will really affect anyone at all in any major way. It may make some made up numbers go up -- or down -- but realistically it will have no major effect on anyone at all, except myself (and negatively).
Whatever effect it elicits in another will be short-lived, and forgotten next quarter -- least of all recompensed sufficiently for the sacrifices made.