[cjy]

I thought this article made a lot of really good points (especially about wasting time tracking commissions).

However, the OP seemed to miss why we pay sales people with commissions but programmers with salaries: it is easy to objectively measure the output of sales people and it is not easy to objectively measure the value of code.

If you asked the question, "Why do we pay most people in salaries?" the answer is because there is no easy way to pay-by-performance for most creative, subjective, or service oriented tasks.