Sending the sales team on a paid vacation to a tropical paradise while the engineering product flounders is such a perfect representation of corporate rot it sounds like something out of a Mike Judge movie
That isn't true. Early sales employees ('customer success', 'technical sales', 'growth', maybe product roles) get just as much equity as engineers who join at a similar time. The difference is that engineers often join earlier, with the commensurate risk that comes with.
Also equity rarely pays out so you'd need to be comparing the probability of an exit that actually rewards the share class that engineers get, whether or not they've been diluted to nothing, whether there's a secondary market to sell on before an exit event, etc. It also depends on whether someone even wants the potential reward equity gives them over the more tangible rewards of money and perks.
Comparing this stuff is hard.
The point here though, is that the company is rewarding sales people at a time when the product is doing poorly, which implies the leadership team care more about selling a bad product than turning it into a good product. I hope that's not the case because it used to be a good platform.
In general i think sales reps make more money overall but have a much more stressful job and can get axed whenever they underperform for a quarter etc
Engineers can also be axed at any time for performance. They're fortunate that most companies are bad at measuring that, but they're also subject to things like stack ranking at very bad companies (fire worst 10% every year) so it's certainly not better to be in eng rather than sales.
Ultimately all roles have aspects of them that suck, so you need to find the one that sucks least for you.
Of course all roles have aspects that suck. But for me FTE is so much less stressful than sales - but I make less money. alas
I never seen this on my 30+ years on the job, other than being an early joiner to startups, equity isn't a thing.
> Engineers who find it distasteful should be happy to know engineers typically get way more equity than sales reps.
At very best, some companies might offer some kind of fixed bonus, if you over delivered as part of the KPI/OKR/whatever goals for the year, or the profits were nice enough that everyone gets a cut.
Even without the equity part i think most engineers should be thankful for not having to hit their kpis to get full paycheck
Someone outside the company who was thinking of joining a B2B sales team, and who likes tropical vacations, might react positively to this post.
Or a potential investor might be impressed to see the company has a mature sales pipeline and plenty of revenue to reward its top salespeople.
It's more a reward for a competition-style work mindset.
Most (enterprise focused) companies, even outside of tech, has something like this. Called Club, P-club, presidents club, circle of excellence, etc.
HackerOne chose a sales-first culture and this is their way of rewarding that growth.