[notahacker]

I worked in a commission sales environment and had a completely different experience. Probably your company management sucked. As it is I had my reservations about my management too, but the payment of commission has the neat effect on focusing attention on boosting their bottom line and diverting oneself away from most of the other dubious metrics they liked to distract me with.

I raised an eyebrow when Joe referred to system-gaming by "making fake phone calls to hit call numbers". If you're incentivising staff with ensuring they adhere to largely meaningless metrics like that you're doing it wrong (it's more or less exactly analogous to judging programmers by their lines of code). Beating them with a stick for not meeting those sort of targets is "coercion", not to mention requiring data-collection time sink; offering a carrot for things sold, which presumably requires tracking anyway, isn't.

Commission sales specifically attracts people who consider themselves to be better than average salespeople. Yes, sometimes they have sociopathic tendencies (although they tend to be the ones who only think they're good). Yes, without going to the ridiculous lengths of some recruiters, good salespeople do tend to have a more mercenary attitude towards work than programmers (they don't have weekend cold calling projects either!), just as programmers on average have somewhat different motivating factors at work from investment bankers, academics and actual rock stars. Even if greed isn't always good, sales roles with an absence of commission and commensurately higher salary incentivises those who suck at selling (or who despite impressive credentials suck at selling your product specifically) to stick around longer. If you're a startup, you're probably not able to offer your staff as attractive a package as Fog Creek or select your salespeople so successfully in the first place.

I agree with the original poster that sales jobs are a good idea for hackers considering starting a startup