If a sales guy sells 10x, he gets 10x commision.. If a coder produces 10x, pay him 10x.
What is so hard to understand about that ?
What is so hard to understand about that ?
With sales, it's very easy: you count Dollars In The Door. Maybe you also count something like New Customer Logos Acquired or something like that, but generally speaking it's just cash. The salesperson brought in new marginal cash, and you're paying some portion of that back to him/her.
With code, it's hard to know what to measure: lines of code? Features produced? Ratio of LoC/bugs discovered? Mean time between when a piece of code is written and when we recognize that it needs to be refactored? It's just a much messier process.
None of this is to argue against incentive comp for engineers. It's just to point out that in sales, you're measuring and paying for output. Output is much harder to measure in engineering than it is in sales, and compensation is fuzzier as a result.
If they can't, perhaps they're 0.5x managers.
There are difficulties, but there are difficulties in any job. It's still the job of management to evaluate the performance and contribution of their employees.
The more rote the process, the worse it will be, since, as you say, it will be able to be gamed. As a general rule, I've found larger organizations are worse at it because they have more rote processes, with complicated matrices, charts, etc.
I've been a cog at small, medium, and large orgs. I've been team or project-level management at small and large orgs. I was happiest being management at the small level. Much less politic-y stuff and more freedom to manage the way I saw best. I enjoyed being managed most at the mid-level company. Less room for managerial whims that small companies can suffer from. (Yes, I know I'm playing both sides on that. Heh.) And less of the 7,000 item Employee Evaluation Form Of Doom that big companies have.
It's hard, no doubt. But a manager saying they can't accurately evaluate their employees is literally saying, "I can't do my job." Any manager should always have a very, very good idea what's going on with their employees and their contributions.
Never met someone that is 10x more productive than the rest?
Do you reward writing more code, better code, code with less bugs? There is no one axis to measure along where as in sales you just measure the sale price.
For programmers it's the same. Good programmers can make or break a business by building software which sells itself, or by building software with 10 times less effort, turning loss into profit, but many people hiring the programmers don't see it that way, so many programming jobs underpay, and many people paid to program have no business being anywhere near a keyboard.
Then why does your company employ you? Are they doing charity?
It was fun, really. Lots of travel, lots of meeting people, lots of finding out what they really wanted us to be offering.
Anyway, I learned a lot about the art of sales, and while I was admittedly jealous of the money our salesguys made (some in 7-figure-land), I also learned it takes a specific kind of person to do it well.
And I could easily see why so many of them were such heavy drinkers. Combination of having to be very social and having the pressure of the revenue riding personally on your shoulders. I think as engineers you don't feel that pressure so directly. Certain execs in a startup, sure, but they're also part sales, in a way.