Why Must You Pay Sales People Commissions?

Very rarely, in my experience. The only dev I've worked directly with that was fired over job performance was first fired when he deleted the entire contents of the corporate IMAP server for a dozen or so people without having verified the most recent backups were up to date and working. We didn't lose enough for it to cause a lasting problem, but it was what finally demonstrated to the CEO that he was careless enough for us to fire.

His code was atrocious, but we'd put up with that until the IMAP incident because getting the CEO to understand that his code was bad enough for him to actually be a net loss in performance for the team didn't work until we had to scramble to recover what we could of the corporate e-mail.

Last I saw he was a senior developer somewhere more prestigious than the position he was fired from. Maybe he's improved. Or maybe he's just managing to stay above the threshold they'd fire him for.

A lot of bad developers just learn to fly sufficiently under the radar and hunker down and accept that they probably won't get many raises until they move jobs and can point to X years of service in company Y, aided by lack of willingness at many companies to stick their neck out when it comes to giving bad references (a lot of places I've worked, HR policy has been clear that we were only allowed to confirm dates of employment).

Here's something that's only touched upon:

Sales people can vary a lot in the amount of money they bring in, and the variance isn't necessarily explicable by things in their CV. In other words a guy can talk a good talk as well as have a positive record, but when you drop them into your org, you're taking a chance on whether they manage to get anything done. (Which is true for devs as well, but people tend to think -wrongly- they know how to identify devs.)

So paying them on commission is necessary because if they fail you want them out and you cannot afford to pay them anyway. If they do well they share in some of the upside from the uncertainty crystallising to positive.

Sure we like what we do but in the end of the day the engineers wake up and commute to the office to earn money for their services. Given FU money upfront, many would still code for fun of course, but unlikely the same kind of corp CRUD app or Uber for pets or cloud staging scripts, year after year as on the job.

There's no reason to envy sales people being "paid so much" anyway. For every high earner there's a dozen who are living fairly stressful, very unstable lower income life. It is a very competitive line of work, directly reflecting the competitive nature of market economy - from which many of engineers are blissfully shielded.

A huge portion of the small to mid-sized clients I have which end up using AWS do so because they've been approached by sales people handing out free credits like candy. Often it short-circuits cost/benefit evaluations completely.

But AWS also often start as a $10/month product, and then one more, and one more. I think that's a huge portion of their success - it's easy to ramp up the cost slow enough and in small enough steps to not trigger any major approvals until it's "too late". People usually move off AWS first when if it gets to be enough of a cost pain-point to make higher ups take notice.

You might be onto something. Paying devs this way could stop the rewrite in new the js framework flavor of the month over and over, and instead put focus on adding features and fixing bugs.