The most important phrase in that whole link: in proportion to their impact Perhaps if software teams didn't write such shitty software it would be easier

The most important phrase in that whole link: in proportion to their impact Perhaps if software teams didn't write such shitty software it would be easier to qualify things like profit sharing and equity. I would certainly prefer to have half the salary if that means I were earning a nice slice of the quarterly profit. Unless you are selling software to a customer software is always a cost center. It is a tool, a means to end, which may enable business down the road but at any moment is just a money sink. That said it is generally lower risk for all parties to allow developers to write shitty software than attempt to connect software releases to revenue change. In the world of web most developers I have worked with over my nearly 2 decades toil in configurations and composition. There is little or no application creation, and the application creation that does occur does so by a few internally trusted individuals irrespective of their pay or title. To be very clear shitty software decisions almost always come down to a single question: Is a given decision primarily focused on business goals or developer preferences. For example is Spring MVC, Angular, or whatever a consideration because it will save the company $10 million over the next 2 years or is it because the company is more invested in hiring developers than internally training them?