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by kqr
879 days ago
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I also think this is weird. These sorts of compensation schemes incentivise short-term revenue at the expense of making the sales that are good for the organisation long term. They encourage an "always be closing" mindset that leads to signing customers that take the organisation on a bad trajectory. But when I asked an actually really good[1] salesperson about this, they said that it's simply that you can't hire good salespeople on flat compensation because the good ones don't want to subsidise the pay of the less good ones. So essentially you have to choose between variable comp, which increases the likelihood of short-term focused sales, or fixed comp, which takes to near zero the likelihood of long-term focused sales. Both are bad! ---- [1]: By "good" in this case I don't mean "closes a lot of revenue" but "picks customers that are good for the future of the organisation" (and also happens to close a lot of revenue but that's secondary.) |
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A similarly-minded SWE, on the other hand, doesn't have the metrics. Either they're at a FAANG and trying to hit their less-obvious metrics for promotions, or they're instead just packing fresh keywords on their resume, and preparing to refresh Leetcode and job-hop every 18 months, to increase their compensation that way.
(I still don't want to do metrics for engineering; I want engineering thinking and working holistically, as a team -- for the interests of the company, even though leadership won't understand most of the subtle differences of what a great engineering team does for the company. The current SWE careerism grinding mis-alignments will have to end, though, once people acknowledge that we really need SWE not to be, as XKCD said, "our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die".)