151–160 of 241 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine they had to introduce variable comp for sales because they weren’t able to hire even a single good enterprise sales rep for a flat $200k. It’s not a culture thing, it’s just the market rate for the role. If they paid a flat $500k they’d stand a better chance of avoiding variable comp.
I find the whole variable comp for sales so bizarre. It’s like people trying to claim that the only way to get decent work out of programmers is by giving them comp on lines of code written. Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
A lot of selling is zero sum. For you to win, if usually means someone (a competitor) has to lose. So it attracts competitive people just like programming tends to attract more analytical people.
The right skills for the right job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, We don't hire only SF Bar Area SWEs. Only about a quarter of the company is in the Bay Area. > but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople? I'm not sure I've ever met an equivalent salesperson. Maybe that's a personal thing. Given the other responses in this thread, it seems to be fairly universal. > And you manage the imperfect alignment? No…
1. Did you go straight from founders and marketing/relations people doing sales, to hiring salespeople with a conventional compensation scheme? (Or were there some other things you tried in between?)
2. Given the opinionated and unconventional ideas that you have for engineering and product culture, and also given that traditional enterprise sales culture was powerful enough to overwhelm that for hiring... is there anything you're consciously trying to do differently in enterprise sales, and how do you accomplish that within the (fairly transactional?) relationship that you have with your sales team?
I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual pro…
> when there's a bottom line to answer to Having VC money doesn't mean that you can ignore finances. We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN. > Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, Respectfully, I think this attitude is flat-out wrong. Because of this: > there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. Directly , s…
Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual pro…
self-contradictory statement if there ever was one.
related: have you heard of system administrator appreciation day?
or heard of:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2b4n7a/til_h...
?
I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual pro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it was more like dropping out of college is a red flag.
Hm, well I am not sure about that either.
From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 -- which was top of mind since I started looking at the postings after reading the article. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine they had to introduce variable comp for sales because they weren’t able to hire even a single good enterprise sales rep for a flat $200k. It’s not a culture thing, it’s just the market rate for the role. If they paid a flat $500k they’d stand a better chance of avoiding variable comp.
I find the whole variable comp for sales so bizarre. It’s like people trying to claim that the only way to get decent work out of programmers is by giving them comp on lines of code written. Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual pro…
> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering . An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k? One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engin…
I wonder how many roles there are like this: low valued because they are low valued, in a vicious cycle. We hire people to fill a prescribed low-value role and don't expect much of them so we don't pay them much and so we don't get much out of them, because we designed the role to be low impact.
If we treat every role as a $200k/yr role, it makes sense that the first thing that would happen is that we find a way to give people leverage to make >$200k of difference in each role! And that's a really exciting proposition from both the employee and customer perspective.