Earlier quoted context omitted.
I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap. You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it becaus…
> we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff. SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC. Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just c…
At Oxide's scale, it would likely be hard to hide out in the way you're suggesting. It's a very technical sale, and probably any material deal is going to involve some discussion with someone beyond just a single sales rep.
Perhaps to bcantrill's point in the post though, I would suggest you reconsider the assumption that Sales people are purely coin operated. I'd love to hear from their reps directly, but as an example from my own experience, lots of the early Google Cloud sales folks were there because they hated how places like Oracle or Microsoft treated their customers. They were absolutely taking less peak pay, for what they felt was a better relationship.
Sales is fundamentally about relationships and trust in this kind of high-touch transaction. Badly behaving reps are pretty quickly outed, one way or another, though at big companies it can take a while to fire them.