[steveklabnik]

> SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused,

We don't hire only SF Bar Area SWEs. Only about a quarter of the company is in the Bay Area.

> but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?

I'm not sure I've ever met an equivalent salesperson. Maybe that's a personal thing. Given the other responses in this thread, it seems to be fairly universal.

> And you manage the imperfect alignment?

No measure is perfect, that's true.

[neilv]

Thank you. Two followups, trying to learn from Oxide:

1. Did you go straight from founders and marketing/relations people doing sales, to hiring salespeople with a conventional compensation scheme? (Or were there some other things you tried in between?)

2. Given the opinionated and unconventional ideas that you have for engineering and product culture, and also given that traditional enterprise sales culture was powerful enough to overwhelm that for hiring... is there anything you're consciously trying to do differently in enterprise sales, and how do you accomplish that within the (fairly transactional?) relationship that you have with your sales team?

[steveklabnik]

1. I don't work on that side of things, but yeah, that's my understanding. We did discuss if we were going to try and do the flat scheme, but I believe we made the decision to be more traditional before we ended up putting up the job descriptions.

2. I can't answer that, as I don't work on that, but maybe someone else will read the thread and chime in. Sorry about that!