I think you're getting hung up on the difference between product work and product revenue. Think of this like the terms front office and back office. The back o

I think you're getting hung up on the difference between product work and product revenue. Think of this like the terms front office and back office. The back office (engineers, product managers) build the core software and the front office (traders, salespeople) use or sell that software to bring in revenue for the company. The terminology doesn't refer to which parties did more work to release the product, it refers to which parties are closest to the revenue, and thereby have more quantifiable metrics to be judged upon. Unsurprisingly, software engineers can make just as much or more than salespeople if they work in roles that happen to be very quantifiably attached to revenue generation, this just isn't the norm.