Sales is much more publicly metric driven than development.

Many top sales organizations have public quotas, with quarterly contests, and public records showing how everyone is doing against it.

The nature of sales (public wins and failures, lots of banging your head into the wall on a daily basis to support an unknown long term outcome) is why there are a lot of athletes that get into it.

The app seems to be very much in line with this type of thinking.

But yes - it would never work for developers.

I'm a developer for Ambition, and the product focuses on encouraging competition, but not "zero sum" competition. The salespeople are grouped into teams, so a lot of the fun and motivation comes from wanting your team to do as well as possible.

The success of your team is also not at the expense of the teams you're competing against, at least in terms of real world sales/results. Sure, only one team is going to come out on top of any given matchup, but not because they've had to sabotage the team they're competing against.

Developers compete with each other too, although perhaps not as openly. For example, developers who consistently produce less than their peers will eventually be fired, or not given raises.