[zeveb]

I would be really interested to see this model applied to software. I am unaware of any firm that has done it this way so far — which is odd, because it really does seem tailor-made to suit our sort of work, no?

Or maybe I am missing something.

[namdnay]

I'm not sure it's what you'd describe as "software", but consultancy firms like Deloitte have an identical structure, and they do a lot of IT projects

[scottjg]

i think the reason consultancies (legal firms, accounting firms, etc) do it, and not traditional software companies, is because the worker hours translate directly into billable hours. Partners are incentivized to bring in more business, which the associates (and the partner him/herself) can bill against. I think partners are usually expected to bring in a certain amount of business to justify their profit share.

In a traditional software company, like a SaaS business, I don't know how it would translate. A developer fixing bugs might be important for the business, but ultimately is hard to translate to the bottom line. It's not like hiring a high level executive will have a guaranteed ROI in the same way.

[quantified]

Sounds like the distinction is between project work and owning one or more products. A Wipro could function like this. No reason a Microsoft couldn’t, but they just don’t.

[throwaways885]

Deloitte make a huge point of hiring apprentices - taking on dozens (maybe nearly ~100) of them on every year. Seems the general goal of everyone there is to make partner one day.

[lmeyerov]

In software co's, profit sharing is split between equity vs commission, where equity for hard-to-attribute & motivate stuff and commission for easy-to-attribute-and-motivate stuff. Doing profit sharing incentives for devs risks getting weird quickly.

-- It's hard to measure contributions of a dev in a team of 5-10 (how much was them, another dev, the PM, the designer?) while pretty clear for say a sales + sales eng pair.

-- Likewise, there's a danger of confusing incentivizes of having a dev make commission-based decisions, esp. when counter to what a PM needs to incentivize. in a sense, part of the PM's job is to prevent sales/marketing/management from confusing the rest of the org!

For product orgs, some companies do incentives and promotions based on profit/loss measurables ("1% datacenter power savings => $10M/yr savings => ..."), I think team-based w/ some sort of hierarchy. Alternatively, Cisco weird spin-in system worked well... for those liked by the involved leads.

When _not_ a product org and a more direct line to $, like a sales eng supporting sales, or a dev supporting a quant, easier to go commission/profit-sharing based..

[quantified]

Wouldn’t be a VC model but wouldn’t need to be. Interesting thought. Maybe someone with knowledge of an example will find this thread and add to it.