Imagine if you as an engineer were told your total compensation was $150,000 per year. But only half of that would be certain. The other $75,000 would be depend

Imagine if you as an engineer were told your total compensation was $150,000 per year. But only half of that would be certain. The other $75,000 would be dependent on how many unique features you helped ship in a month/quarter/year and how many of those were bug free. And you didn't have full control over the release cycle - there were a lot of dependencies with other orgs (devops/QA/product management) And as your company grew they could yank you off a feature about to release and put you in a new group where you were just starting to work on a new release. You had to assume that your company wasn't going to screw up and impact your ability to ship. That's at least the right mindset to compare yourself to sales person compensation. And remember, technical sales people can do very well so if it looks more attractive you should think about making the leap.