[auctiontheory]

A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar.

Actually that's not true at all. High-performing salespeople in tech (and other industries) are extremely well-paid, and tend not to have fancy degrees.

Sales is still a career in which hustle and results are valued over book smarts, and there is no branch of a company that is "closer to revenue" than sales.

[nilkn]

Do you have any statistics to support this? And what do you mean by "extremely well-paid"? Anything under $400k doesn't count. Do you honestly think that's a typical salary these days for a salesperson in most industries? I assure you it is not. Most will never make that in their life. Also, how many of these extremely well-paid salespeople that you know didn't even attend college?

Finally, the upper ranks of many Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are filled to the brim with graduates of HBS and similar. There are lots of ex-McKinsey consultants in VP positions in the industry.

[auctiontheory]

The discussion you introduced was about salespeople - guys (mostly) who have a quota, who "carry a bag." It's a highly-paid profession in which Harvard and Wharton MBAs are underrepresented. Enterprise hardware and software salespeople can make well over $400K.

Whether or not the upper ranks of Facebook used to work for Rajat Gupta is hardly relevant to the question of how much salespeople make!

[nilkn]

Do you have any support for these figures? I've never heard of so many salespeople making so much money, and all salary reports I can find most certainly do not support your claim of this being even remotely typical.