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Putting prediction hat on before reading article: "because your competitors pay commission" > Company A pays commissions and, if you do what you know you can do, you will earn $1M/year. Company B refuses to pay commissions for “cultural reasons” and offers $200K/year. Which job would you take? Now imagine that you are a horrible sales person who would be lucky to sell anything and will get fired in a performance-base…
Survivorship bias. If you were wrong you wouldn't have posted :-)
Are there any examples of competitive sales organizations that don't pay commission of some kind?
No idea if that will change now that a PE firm bought them.
A strong argument would at least consider the systemic consequences of commissions, rather than just extolling the assumed virtues in a circular argument. What is their impact on product? On support? Engineering morale? On the customer experience itself? Just a myriad of effects not even considered here when commissions are looked at in isolation, the system be damned. It's probably very true that it's not plausible…
It's not a circular argument to point out that excellent sales people will take the commission job, while bad sales people will take the salaried job. All the things you mention (support, morale, ...) are second-order considerations -- the first order consideration is getting the best people.
What if there was no commission job available as an alternative?
I like how he inadvertently admits that engineers are compensated less well in part because they mistake their jobs for something fun they'd do anyway.
Yeah, certainly there are a lot of programmers writing software because it's fun for them. They're contributing to FOSS projects because they believe in them. Are they doing what _you_ want them to do just for fun? Probably not.
I just don't think that means I should be compensated less well, or told that it means I should appreciate being paid (for my job, obviously) while doing something I love, etc.
There's a simpler explanation: people are afraid of rejection. Sales is difficult because it requires acknowledgement and constant interaction with rejection. It takes more of a psychological toll than engineering, and some people don't want to deal with it, or do not have the personality to brush off repeated rejections in order to get a sale.
"Important Update *
I am currently employed at Pluralsight, and I feel obligated to point out that the author of this article, our CEO, no longer believes or stands behind any of the content in this article. Pluralsight does not operate under the Deming philosophy. As of January 2017, Pluralsight will be implementing sales commissions again. We have reverted to the typical high-pressure, high-stress quota models found in most companies.
I'm sharing this because I don't want anybody to read this article and follow the bad advice found here. Maybe commissionless sales organizations can work, but apparently not at Pluralsight."
Why do sales people get commissions and engineers don't? Because the sales person knows exactly how much money they bring in and can claim "if I didn't make the sale, that money would not be coming in" even though it's not always true it's a good story. An engineers actions are so far removed from revenue that they can't make a claim so directly. Also, if they did want to claim a portion of product revenue they could…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also personality. Good salespeople are... Good salespeople. They apply their craft when negotiating compensation. What am I going to do, make a single page app about why I should be paid more? ...actually that's not a bad idea.
When I was still in the humanities (German Literature Major), my program was making a MAJOR push for all graduates of the major to be able to articulate to others and interviewers the skillset they'd gained during their time at university, and I found it quite useful and helpful, even though I can't remember too much about the specifics. I even talked to one of my professors personally about the push, in which I ment…