[illegalmemory]

They have since updated it slightly

> Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component.

[ekianjo]

so basically everything converges to having specific reasons to have different salary schemes.

[ArnoVW]

One exception, for sales. I don't see how they could have done it differently.

We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary)

Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes.

So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from growth a little bit earlier and directer.

If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales department.

[liamkinne]

Yes, but you aren't wasting time early on negotiating compensation.

[IncreasePosts]

Why is sales special? Why not just have some performance bar for that, just like all the other positions?

[castlecrasher2]

Because good sales staff make a ton of money through a ton of sales. Any other incentive structure is unlikely to attract high performers.

[darren0]

It's pretty fundamental to the personality of people in sales to be driven by getting the sale and getting compensated based on the deal size. If you remove that carrot, it just doesn't work. Some sales people will make millions, some will make nothing.

[sofixa]

Because sales people are used to work on incentives, including going over and getting rewarded for it.

If they have a fixed salary with a high objective to "make it" (e.g. if you sell less than $X, you get fired), lots of sales folks will skip on it because they can't go over, and most probably prefer to have a quarter or two or year at e.g. 70% salary while working on longer term deals, rather than losing their job for not being good enough within that arbitrary time period. And going over their quota can be wildly lucrative depending on the terms.

[OkayPhysicist]

The key difference between everyone else in a company and Sales is that Sales is where the money comes in, directly. It's approximately trivial to point at a sale, see how much money it made, and then who made the sale. So commission is a natural compensation structure for salespeople. For everyone else at a company, their individual contribution to the company making money is a lot more diffuse, and any metric you might be tempted to try and put a commission on is at risk of being gamed. Whereas "how much $$$/worth of stuff did we sell" is pretty much THE metric by which we judge a business as a whole.

[rubicon33]

If you’re asking this question then you have really no idea how the sales engine works at a company. It’s inherently incentive driven.

[hiddencost]

Sales culture is heavily incentive and performance based.

It sucks but they like to think that if they work harder they'll get paid more.