> we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.

SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC.

Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?

> Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.

And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)