When I was at BigCo, they officially had 2 paths - one involved people leadership, the other technical leadership. The reality was technical leadership stopped a level below director, and only 2 or 3 even managed to make it that far. After 3.5 years there, it had a formative impact of pushing me away from both the company and technology. I recovered on both, but it's something one should take seriously on taking a job. I'm not sure that creating "Mega-consultants" works either, as it takes the emphasis away from delivery ownership.
That said, here are a few ideas in rank order from easy/feasible to crazy/radical:
1) Technical leaders of a certain level can not be overruled on technical decisions by non-technical leaders in the department.
2) Encourage the best to share their work outside the firm.
3) Smart people like to be with smart people. Pay up for a culture or cohort of superstars, not an individual superstar.
4) Provide time and monetary budget for architecture and technical debt that is owned and allocated by the best in the organization.
5) Allow technical stars to have the ability to change assignments at their will with a given notice period. (Yes it may cause problems, but the free market is always giving them offers)
6) Enable managers to raise technical pay without concern for bands. For example, the VP should be able to say, "I can hire 4 engineers for 100K each, or I can hire someone in the open market for 200K. Instead I will pay my internal superstar 220K since she will do it the best, even though it's way out of bands of someone with her seniority and level."
One thing you definitely don't want to do is take a team away from people who consider themselves to be engineers who happen to be in a people manager role (and have been for a long time and are considered by their team and the wider engineering org to be successful at it). And if you want to do this, you have to make sure the person, and their team, is on board with making that change.
This can be especially problematic if you don't have a culture of the organization being driven by engineering; where becoming a "manager" affords more success (making decisions, getting things done) purely because you're a manager now (because of the political aspects). Removing the people management leadership position then can feel like a demotion.
One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money.
Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before)
Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary)
Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's why you have open source projects right?).
> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a
> more relaxed job
If you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
I have no problem with getting less money for doing something I'm good at and not doing something I know I'd hate and probably suck at. After all, I gave up a career of a hedge fund manager and a billionaire already to be an engineer - probably for the same reasons, because I suspect I'd actually suck at hedge fund managing and won't become a billionaire. In the same vein, if I tried to become a director knowing I'd suck at it, I may briefly enjoy the benefits of higher salary, after which my incompetence and my dissatisfaction with the job would become apparent and I'd be asked to leave. So long term it is probably a bad plan, unless people I'm going to direct over and report to are exceptionally obtuse and won't notice me reaching my Peter ceiling. That happens, but why would I want my life to depend on it?
And remember, we're not talking about vow of poverty here exactly. 150K gets you in top 10% easily, and if you have a household with two 150K salaries you're pretty close to the much envied 1%. Maybe there's a point where more money wouldn't actually make it better if it comes with more frustration?
As for why directors get more money - again, I have no problem with people doing what I can't and won't do getting more money than I do. My life is not a competition with them, it's a competition with my last year self. If I win that, I'm good. Which means, if the company wants to keep a good engineer who thinks like me, they should be able to provide some track for me to be better next year - position-wise, money-wise, respect-wise, responsibility-wise, however it goes - than last year, without forcing people into doing something they may suck at.
At many companies, including Facebook, there are parallel individual-engineer tracks and management tracks, with the pay scale equivalent between the two. It isn't good to nudge engineers towards management for financial reasons.
I absolutely dig the money argument. A bad junior manager will probably make much more money than a jedi developer. Therefore many people choose to be a bad manager instead of a happy, good, developer.
Whilst I agree that technical leadership is one aspect that skilled engineers can develop (and I agree that it's important for all engineers) there are many more.
For example, developers can grow into great product managers. Some can deep-dive into a topic and develop by sharing that knowledge through conferences, blogs etc. Some are interested in the people management side of things (scrum, kanban etc). All of these (and much more) are incredibly valuable and increase the value to the company they work for.
The challenge for companies is to recognize all these degrees of value (and reward them appropriately). I did some work to try and capture this with a visualization called a skills map (http://blog.red-gate.com/skills-maps/). Any feedback greatly appreciated!
This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you had no manager and had no assigned work but people from other projects could come to them for advice, help, consultation, etc. and they could choose what they wanted to work on.
Often the Jedi Masters were tapped to teach intro engineering course to new engineers on the specifics of the type of projects this company worked on, so this was a quasi-academic and quasi-consulting gig for the best of the best engineers.
As a fairly new engineer, I got assigned to a new group and invited to a meeting that could impact the system I was working on. I show up and it is a meeting with an engineering partner (outside company) that was contesting some calcs regarding the pipe strength and mounting requirements for an installation (multi-billion dollar project). Their engineering team was insisting on assumptions that would have quadrupled the cost of a system that our group was responsible for, not to mention weeks or months of delays to recalc and redesign the system. Unbeknownst to me, this dispute had been at logger heads for months with no resolution.
One of the Jedi's, let's just call him Fred, taught me years before in the intro courses and I had remained in contact with him over time. Based on the courses Fred taught I thought he might have the expertise and interest in this area to take a look at this problem so I met with him and gave him the technical details. He agreed to attend the next meeting and advise but he made me do all the calcs, presentation and etc. for the next meeting but all under his guidance. So I go through my PPT presentation and at the end the other company's engineers have all sorts of objections, disagreements, etc. So our Jedi steps in and starts fielding questions and asks them to justify their position. It turns out that their reference text they were using to justify their position was actually written by Fred! I can still hear the other engineer say, "you mean you are Fred XYZ that wrote book ABC" with awe and respect in his voice. It turns out they were missing some important exceptions and qualifications later in the book that Fred cited and the meeting and conflict was resolved.
So the moral of the story is to always have a Jedi in your corner? No.
The moral of the story is that engineers and problem solvers (and I assume coders) have different motivation than the "success" of big, showy career managing a lot of people. We (technical people) love to solve problems and management is projecting their values onto technical people when they offer them management positions as "promotions".
This is exactly the sentiment I was going for - people who want to stay engineers should be compensated for their badassery, and respected for it, which is usually all they want. That right there is exactly the "power to say No" I was talking about.
And how do you know if an engineer wants to stay an engineer or not? By asking them.
Thanks for sharing!! Like this story a lot better than the linked blog article. A positive example of real evidence is so much more effective than an essay of meta.
Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually? I go back and forth on if I want to pursue an MBA every couple years or so (though I doubt the education would be worth it, it'd be a stamp on my resume for wanting to go that direction).
Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.
> Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually?
I doubt it. The idea of not wanting to manage people gets more noise because 'moving into management' seems to be default path, and in some organizations if you don't move in that direction, you are punished. So people complain more loudly about these issues.
There's quite a bit of variety on "the business side", FWIW. Getting an MBA does not necessarily get one increased access to it, depending on what you want to do and where you want to do it.
Dave McClure had a really good discussion once on starting a startup as the new MBA: far more interesting to hear you talk about how you sold $200k of sales than hear about how you read about someone doing the same. This also gives you a lot of opportunities to directly apply engineering skills in the service of your business goals. Those opportunities exist (in quantity!) in real life, but may not in any given MBA program.
Im with you dude. I began programming when I was 10 and have been doing it my entire life. Once I began working in organizations instead of on my own projects I was fascinated as to how the code I wrote was only a piece of it. I moved into management and I haven't really looked back. I still get to code, but its when I want to.
A lot of people in this thread are pointing to the possibility of a technical track, but I just don't buy it.
Any technical track stops far short of the management track, even in the most enlightened of companies. Taken to an extreme, you don't get to be CEO off the technical track.
Ultimately, if you want more money and influence, you have to choose the management track. The technical track just exists to keep technical talent from leaving——look at any companies with technical tracks (ex. Facebook) and you won't find their top earners on it.
This is just a matter of scale. Sure you might be a "10x" developer, and such a developer does provide a tremendous amount of value to an organization. But if you are such an effective manager as to raise the value of a team of engineers significantly, then you are going to generally provide more value to the company than a single rockstar engineer. Of course there are outliers (IE Carmack) but generally skilled technical management scales better than skilled individual technical talent.
You may be right, but you might find plenty of managers wielding their power and/or influence, who wish they made as much as the guys at the top of the technical track.
There is an underlying assumption to a lot if this thread that it's the person that is "worth" an amount. But, worth depends on what you do and price depends on how hard it is to find someone else to do it.
Managers are worth a lot and the difference between the best option and the second best one is greater, at least that's what the market seems to be saying. You are worth x doing X job and y doing Y job. It may also be true that you are worth more to employer x than y.
It's ok to make decisions not solely based on price.
But what if you are worth more, managing a group of engineers?
Sure, it is a bit of a new skill, but the ace engineer who can guide a team with his engineering wisdom is way more valuable than the engineer who just works by himself.
I really like the idea of "handoffs" that the article discusses It indirectly brings up what I see as a major problem for some of the most talented engineers I've worked with which is that some point they get too bogged down with the incremental features and maintenance on all the amazing stuff they've done in the past to work on new things. When it would take them a couple days to implement/fix X but weeks for someone else to come up to speed management just can't resist assigning it to them and eventually they become burnt out. Code reviews and mentoring can help this to reduce the time for new folks to spin up and contribute but I think a formal notion of handoffs is a really interesting idea.
Having been both an engineer and a manager, yes different tracks for different people are really helpful. The main thing I've learned is that different people want different rewards an there is no substitute for spending the time with people to figure out what sparks joy for them. Usually there is some baseline of money but often freedom, respect, and cool projects are just as important.
Well yeah on the dollars++ and the equity++ - often that's a harder sell, existing managers usually have to have some kind of thing to point at in order to make those things manifest - a lot of non-coders don't know how to quantify your contributions- these strategies are supposed to add up to raises, promotions, bonuses, etc., and make getting the tangibles you want easier. Plus, if the tangibles don't come with the thought leadership recognition, someone else will usually come along, and recognize you in the way you want to be recognized.
Thanks for this, it helped me think through some very specific things that I have been struggling with at my startup. I joined out of school as one of the first engineers excited as hell, but have been somewhat sad/depressed/etc. over the last few months because I've felt a lack of direction and proper guidance.
Over lunch, president asks me if I wanted to become an engineering manager or something of that nature as well as take management coaching classes. It was a very sad thing to hear someone say to an engineer.
We want to lead by example. Thought, learning, and then code. We want to set or be a part of an engineering culture that has the freedom to be creative in our space. Some roles that jump out at are the developer advocate type roles. Not just "Hey, look at what you can do with our APIs", but be learning and sharing that knowledge with our peers and others around the web (recruiting).
I'm really curious to learn more about the different directions you're thinking about and what kind of guidance you wish was there, but you don't feel you have. For my own startup, I'm trying to dig into the career challenges and questions developers have and try to build a product that helps them in their journey.
Also, Drive by Daniel Pink is worth a read if you haven't read it before. It's main hypothesis is that Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are the keys to happiness in your career.
Having just become a co-manager for ~50 engineers, this is really interesting and timely advice. I don't pretend to have all the answers about how to reward great engineers, so hearing more people speak about this is really useful to me.
My initial reaction is "reward them with more things they can say no to" but that ends up being project management-y if not outright manager-y. I'm very curious to hear more specific examples where this isn't the case.
If anyone in NYC and is in a similar situation to me, I'd love to meet up for coffee to share notes. Or in SF, for that matter (I'm here about once a month). Email in my profile.
Most people will (rightfully) settle for money. Because people need love, and to demonstrate love you need to show that you care, that you're willing to give something up in a hard situation. And the only thing a company cares for is money. So, I want said company to give me money. More money than the 'manager'. Because I can do their job just as badly as they are doing it, but they can't do mine at all.
I don't want your stupid titles and shit - those are cheap. Cash is what will hurt you. Pay up if you care!
And when people realise they have to pay you or lose you, then you get respect. Priceless!!!
Give me equity stake. I don't want to manage, I want to come out of the end ready to start my own venture or retire and do what I love and build and awesome open source project to give back to the community.
I think the most important thing is to have a conversation with your employees - ask them what do they want to do, and how do they want their career to evolve. Constantly keep in sync with your employees' desires, and you should be fine.
My summary/option: Technical leaders should be front-running the team so that, when less experienced engineers run into problems, the technical leader knows in what direction to point the team to find the solution to the problem.
Having technical leaders stuck on legacy Sisyphean tasks (a) sucks up the time that should be used front-running the team for solutions to future problems and (b) removes opportunities for less experienced engineers to learn new ideas and skills, hindering their education and development.
I worked for a while with a software consultancy, as a .NET consultant. One of the nicest things about the company what that they had two distinct career paths for developers - one technical, the other in project management - and they asked us up front what our preference was, and directed our work accordingly. I always thought other companies could take a leaf from their book in this respect.
Perhaps more companies would benefit research teams, who work on the next generation of products with less management interference. Being promoted to the research team could be a useful incentive to keeping talented engineers around. If they do stick around, the maintenance team could still consult the research team about the previous system they built.
It's late so I'm going to screw this up but there are coders and there are leaders. The leaders think about other people and how to make those other people be successful. The coders are more about themselves. Which is fine, I'd just look for people who are trying to make other people be awesome.
The challenge from the business side is to evaluate reliably how to measure "10x" in this context. While there is widespread agreement that some programmers are significantly more productive than others (maybe even 10x as productive), there is much less agreement on how, exactly, such productivity is measured.
With sales, it's very easy: you count Dollars In The Door. Maybe you also count something like New Customer Logos Acquired or something like that, but generally speaking it's just cash. The salesperson brought in new marginal cash, and you're paying some portion of that back to him/her.
With code, it's hard to know what to measure: lines of code? Features produced? Ratio of LoC/bugs discovered? Mean time between when a piece of code is written and when we recognize that it needs to be refactored? It's just a much messier process.
None of this is to argue against incentive comp for engineers. It's just to point out that in sales, you're measuring and paying for output. Output is much harder to measure in engineering than it is in sales, and compensation is fuzzier as a result.
It is not hard to understand, but it is hard to measure.
Do you reward writing more code, better code, code with less bugs? There is no one axis to measure along where as in sales you just measure the sale price.
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
That said, here are a few ideas in rank order from easy/feasible to crazy/radical:
1) Technical leaders of a certain level can not be overruled on technical decisions by non-technical leaders in the department.
2) Encourage the best to share their work outside the firm.
3) Smart people like to be with smart people. Pay up for a culture or cohort of superstars, not an individual superstar.
4) Provide time and monetary budget for architecture and technical debt that is owned and allocated by the best in the organization.
5) Allow technical stars to have the ability to change assignments at their will with a given notice period. (Yes it may cause problems, but the free market is always giving them offers)
6) Enable managers to raise technical pay without concern for bands. For example, the VP should be able to say, "I can hire 4 engineers for 100K each, or I can hire someone in the open market for 200K. Instead I will pay my internal superstar 220K since she will do it the best, even though it's way out of bands of someone with her seniority and level."
[+] [-] thwarted|11 years ago|reply
This can be especially problematic if you don't have a culture of the organization being driven by engineering; where becoming a "manager" affords more success (making decisions, getting things done) purely because you're a manager now (because of the political aspects). Removing the people management leadership position then can feel like a demotion.
[+] [-] zobzu|11 years ago|reply
Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before)
Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary)
Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's why you have open source projects right?).
[+] [-] peteretep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|11 years ago|reply
And remember, we're not talking about vow of poverty here exactly. 150K gets you in top 10% easily, and if you have a household with two 150K salaries you're pretty close to the much envied 1%. Maybe there's a point where more money wouldn't actually make it better if it comes with more frustration?
As for why directors get more money - again, I have no problem with people doing what I can't and won't do getting more money than I do. My life is not a competition with them, it's a competition with my last year self. If I win that, I'm good. Which means, if the company wants to keep a good engineer who thinks like me, they should be able to provide some track for me to be better next year - position-wise, money-wise, respect-wise, responsibility-wise, however it goes - than last year, without forcing people into doing something they may suck at.
[+] [-] gumby|11 years ago|reply
There are many ways to provide leadership, and not every manager leads much.
[+] [-] lacker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jules|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefffoster|11 years ago|reply
For example, developers can grow into great product managers. Some can deep-dive into a topic and develop by sharing that knowledge through conferences, blogs etc. Some are interested in the people management side of things (scrum, kanban etc). All of these (and much more) are incredibly valuable and increase the value to the company they work for.
The challenge for companies is to recognize all these degrees of value (and reward them appropriately). I did some work to try and capture this with a visualization called a skills map (http://blog.red-gate.com/skills-maps/). Any feedback greatly appreciated!
[+] [-] dmfdmf|11 years ago|reply
Often the Jedi Masters were tapped to teach intro engineering course to new engineers on the specifics of the type of projects this company worked on, so this was a quasi-academic and quasi-consulting gig for the best of the best engineers.
As a fairly new engineer, I got assigned to a new group and invited to a meeting that could impact the system I was working on. I show up and it is a meeting with an engineering partner (outside company) that was contesting some calcs regarding the pipe strength and mounting requirements for an installation (multi-billion dollar project). Their engineering team was insisting on assumptions that would have quadrupled the cost of a system that our group was responsible for, not to mention weeks or months of delays to recalc and redesign the system. Unbeknownst to me, this dispute had been at logger heads for months with no resolution.
One of the Jedi's, let's just call him Fred, taught me years before in the intro courses and I had remained in contact with him over time. Based on the courses Fred taught I thought he might have the expertise and interest in this area to take a look at this problem so I met with him and gave him the technical details. He agreed to attend the next meeting and advise but he made me do all the calcs, presentation and etc. for the next meeting but all under his guidance. So I go through my PPT presentation and at the end the other company's engineers have all sorts of objections, disagreements, etc. So our Jedi steps in and starts fielding questions and asks them to justify their position. It turns out that their reference text they were using to justify their position was actually written by Fred! I can still hear the other engineer say, "you mean you are Fred XYZ that wrote book ABC" with awe and respect in his voice. It turns out they were missing some important exceptions and qualifications later in the book that Fred cited and the meeting and conflict was resolved.
So the moral of the story is to always have a Jedi in your corner? No.
The moral of the story is that engineers and problem solvers (and I assume coders) have different motivation than the "success" of big, showy career managing a lot of people. We (technical people) love to solve problems and management is projecting their values onto technical people when they offer them management positions as "promotions".
[+] [-] icyfenix|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choppaface|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimboOmega|11 years ago|reply
Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.
[+] [-] pyre|11 years ago|reply
I doubt it. The idea of not wanting to manage people gets more noise because 'moving into management' seems to be default path, and in some organizations if you don't move in that direction, you are punished. So people complain more loudly about these issues.
[+] [-] patio11|11 years ago|reply
Dave McClure had a really good discussion once on starting a startup as the new MBA: far more interesting to hear you talk about how you sold $200k of sales than hear about how you read about someone doing the same. This also gives you a lot of opportunities to directly apply engineering skills in the service of your business goals. Those opportunities exist (in quantity!) in real life, but may not in any given MBA program.
[+] [-] analog31|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alttab|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watty|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
Any technical track stops far short of the management track, even in the most enlightened of companies. Taken to an extreme, you don't get to be CEO off the technical track.
Ultimately, if you want more money and influence, you have to choose the management track. The technical track just exists to keep technical talent from leaving——look at any companies with technical tracks (ex. Facebook) and you won't find their top earners on it.
[+] [-] tdaltonc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmalarky|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cardiffspaceman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fein|11 years ago|reply
Pay me what I'm worth. None of this managerial shite, just dollars. I will be happy.
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
Managers are worth a lot and the difference between the best option and the second best one is greater, at least that's what the market seems to be saying. You are worth x doing X job and y doing Y job. It may also be true that you are worth more to employer x than y.
It's ok to make decisions not solely based on price.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
Sure, it is a bit of a new skill, but the ace engineer who can guide a team with his engineering wisdom is way more valuable than the engineer who just works by himself.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodreel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jshen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chuckcode|11 years ago|reply
Having been both an engineer and a manager, yes different tracks for different people are really helpful. The main thing I've learned is that different people want different rewards an there is no substitute for spending the time with people to figure out what sparks joy for them. Usually there is some baseline of money but often freedom, respect, and cool projects are just as important.
[+] [-] icyfenix|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azimuth11|11 years ago|reply
Over lunch, president asks me if I wanted to become an engineering manager or something of that nature as well as take management coaching classes. It was a very sad thing to hear someone say to an engineer.
We want to lead by example. Thought, learning, and then code. We want to set or be a part of an engineering culture that has the freedom to be creative in our space. Some roles that jump out at are the developer advocate type roles. Not just "Hey, look at what you can do with our APIs", but be learning and sharing that knowledge with our peers and others around the web (recruiting).
Maybe it's time for a change.
[+] [-] redmattred|11 years ago|reply
If you have a moment, shoot me a note at [email protected]
Also, Drive by Daniel Pink is worth a read if you haven't read it before. It's main hypothesis is that Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are the keys to happiness in your career.
[+] [-] Whitespace|11 years ago|reply
My initial reaction is "reward them with more things they can say no to" but that ends up being project management-y if not outright manager-y. I'm very curious to hear more specific examples where this isn't the case.
If anyone in NYC and is in a similar situation to me, I'd love to meet up for coffee to share notes. Or in SF, for that matter (I'm here about once a month). Email in my profile.
[+] [-] smenko|11 years ago|reply
Most people will (rightfully) settle for money. Because people need love, and to demonstrate love you need to show that you care, that you're willing to give something up in a hard situation. And the only thing a company cares for is money. So, I want said company to give me money. More money than the 'manager'. Because I can do their job just as badly as they are doing it, but they can't do mine at all.
I don't want your stupid titles and shit - those are cheap. Cash is what will hurt you. Pay up if you care!
And when people realise they have to pay you or lose you, then you get respect. Priceless!!!
[+] [-] jaunkst|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultimape|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bahamut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gvb|11 years ago|reply
Having technical leaders stuck on legacy Sisyphean tasks (a) sucks up the time that should be used front-running the team for solutions to future problems and (b) removes opportunities for less experienced engineers to learn new ideas and skills, hindering their education and development.
[+] [-] atlantic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydude|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clueless123|11 years ago|reply
What is so hard to understand about that ?
[+] [-] jaredhansen|11 years ago|reply
With sales, it's very easy: you count Dollars In The Door. Maybe you also count something like New Customer Logos Acquired or something like that, but generally speaking it's just cash. The salesperson brought in new marginal cash, and you're paying some portion of that back to him/her.
With code, it's hard to know what to measure: lines of code? Features produced? Ratio of LoC/bugs discovered? Mean time between when a piece of code is written and when we recognize that it needs to be refactored? It's just a much messier process.
None of this is to argue against incentive comp for engineers. It's just to point out that in sales, you're measuring and paying for output. Output is much harder to measure in engineering than it is in sales, and compensation is fuzzier as a result.
[+] [-] philwelch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtietema|11 years ago|reply
Do you reward writing more code, better code, code with less bugs? There is no one axis to measure along where as in sales you just measure the sale price.
[+] [-] zevyoura|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]