4 ms·

At the end of the day, a salesperson not making quota is going to be fired. The best salesperson in the world could maybe buy themselves an extra year, at best

by jbooth 9y ago

At the end of the day, a salesperson not making quota is going to be fired. The best salesperson in the world could maybe buy themselves an extra year, at best. But eventually, if they're so great, where are the numbers? And their next job search isn't gonna look so great. They can't solve a problem on a whiteboard to make up for the fact that their prior business was a bad fit for the market, or whatever. A salesperson who is making quota and running way over it into big bonuses is by definition earning their money. Sometimes people are in the right place at the right time, of course, but in general it's hard to say a sales person is overpaid unless they're completely useless and failing to earn their base pay.

Waterluvian 9y ago
But a good salesperson who is making quota can also apply their craft to carving a larger piece of the pie for themselves. Just because they're doing well, it does not mean their compensation is an accurate proportion to their contribution to the whole. But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should try to quantify the efficacy of SW devs more. I had a PM do that once in the form of ticket quantification as a KPI. I had to expend a lot of political capital to opt out from that nightmare.
protomyth 9y ago
Agreed and to add: It is very much like a waitress / waiter. Lower base pay with commissions substituting for tips. The big difference is the Darwinian nature of the job. Bad food or service from the kitchen might decrease tips, but probably won’t get the waitstaff fired[1], but salespeople that don’t perform, regardless of the software or support, are going to be canned. I don’t begrudge high salespeople commissions because that means things are pretty good, just don’t let them run the company (see Steve Jobs ‘lost’ 1995 interview with Cringly). 1) until the restaurant goes under
tiggybear 9y ago
Do bad engineers not get fired?
- matwood 9y ago
  Define bad. What metric do you use? Sales people have a single objective metric - sales.
  - kbart 9y ago
    "What metric do you use?" The key difference between good and bad engineers is that good ones deliver the product/finishes the projects (add bonus points if on time) and bad ones don't. Quality makes much less business sense and is usually only important to the engineer himself and his peers than managers that pay his wage. That's especially true in current "move fast and break things" environment. I have seen a fair share of bad engineers (by this definition) fired, even though they had decent technical skills.
- vidarh 9y ago
  Very rarely, in my experience. The only dev I've worked directly with that was fired over job performance was first fired when he deleted the entire contents of the corporate IMAP server for a dozen or so people without having verified the most recent backups were up to date and working. We didn't lose enough for it to cause a lasting problem, but it was what finally demonstrated to the CEO that he was careless enough for us to fire. His code was atrocious, but we'd put up with that until the IMAP incident because getting the CEO to understand that his code was bad enough for him to actually be a net loss in performance for the team didn't work until we had to scramble to recover what we could of the corporate e-mail. Last I saw he was a senior developer somewhere more prestigious than the position he was fired from. Maybe he's improved. Or maybe he's just managing to stay above the threshold they'd fire him for. A lot of bad developers just learn to fly sufficiently under the radar and hunker down and accept that they probably won't get many raises until they move jobs and can point to X years of service in company Y, aided by lack of willingness at many companies to stick their neck out when it comes to giving bad references (a lot of places I've worked, HR policy has been clear that we were only allowed to confirm dates of employment).
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  depends. often the meritocracy of performance reviews is skewed by extroversion and pleasantness of a person toward management, which doesn't have much of a way to judge real skill unless form a technical background and actively working on the codebase.
skookumchuck 9y ago
Coffee is for closers!
gbacon 9y ago
Great point. Compensation is a vector of which job security is a component. Sales: extreme volatility, excellent pay for the survivors. Engineering: medium to high volatility, strong pay. Education: near zero volatility, low pay.

by jbooth 9y ago

Waterluvian 9y ago

But a good salesperson who is making quota can also apply their craft to carving a larger piece of the pie for themselves. Just because they're doing well, it does not mean their compensation is an accurate proportion to their contribution to the whole. But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should try to quantify the efficacy of SW devs more. I had a PM do that once in the form of ticket quantification as a KPI. I had to expend a lot of political capital to opt out from that nightmare.

protomyth 9y ago

Agreed and to add: It is very much like a waitress / waiter. Lower base pay with commissions substituting for tips. The big difference is the Darwinian nature of the job. Bad food or service from the kitchen might decrease tips, but probably won’t get the waitstaff fired[1], but salespeople that don’t perform, regardless of the software or support, are going to be canned. I don’t begrudge high salespeople commissions because that means things are pretty good, just don’t let them run the company (see Steve Jobs ‘lost’ 1995 interview with Cringly). 1) until the restaurant goes under

tiggybear 9y ago

Do bad engineers not get fired?

matwood 9y ago
Define bad. What metric do you use? Sales people have a single objective metric - sales.
- kbart 9y ago
  "What metric do you use?" The key difference between good and bad engineers is that good ones deliver the product/finishes the projects (add bonus points if on time) and bad ones don't. Quality makes much less business sense and is usually only important to the engineer himself and his peers than managers that pay his wage. That's especially true in current "move fast and break things" environment. I have seen a fair share of bad engineers (by this definition) fired, even though they had decent technical skills.
vidarh 9y ago
Very rarely, in my experience. The only dev I've worked directly with that was fired over job performance was first fired when he deleted the entire contents of the corporate IMAP server for a dozen or so people without having verified the most recent backups were up to date and working. We didn't lose enough for it to cause a lasting problem, but it was what finally demonstrated to the CEO that he was careless enough for us to fire. His code was atrocious, but we'd put up with that until the IMAP incident because getting the CEO to understand that his code was bad enough for him to actually be a net loss in performance for the team didn't work until we had to scramble to recover what we could of the corporate e-mail. Last I saw he was a senior developer somewhere more prestigious than the position he was fired from. Maybe he's improved. Or maybe he's just managing to stay above the threshold they'd fire him for. A lot of bad developers just learn to fly sufficiently under the radar and hunker down and accept that they probably won't get many raises until they move jobs and can point to X years of service in company Y, aided by lack of willingness at many companies to stick their neck out when it comes to giving bad references (a lot of places I've worked, HR policy has been clear that we were only allowed to confirm dates of employment).
LoSboccacc 9y ago
depends. often the meritocracy of performance reviews is skewed by extroversion and pleasantness of a person toward management, which doesn't have much of a way to judge real skill unless form a technical background and actively working on the codebase.

skookumchuck 9y ago

Coffee is for closers!

gbacon 9y ago

Great point. Compensation is a vector of which job security is a component. Sales: extreme volatility, excellent pay for the survivors. Engineering: medium to high volatility, strong pay. Education: near zero volatility, low pay.