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Worked great, untill we started to look for sales

… Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes. So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from growth a little bit earlier and directer. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales department.

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EK

so basically everything converges to having specific reasons to have different salary schemes.

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AB

I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide’s compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a flat rate across the company. Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolutely work without commission. Yes, it is harder, but it is not impossible. The carve out for sales undermines the ideas behind a flat salary structure. Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. Sales is as much about the partnerships between sales people and product/engineering, why aren’t all the people who work on a deal getting commission? I’d go as far as to argue that oxide is in the pe…

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EK

> One exception, for sales. either you have a rule or you dont. the moment you start to do exceptions this will call for more down the road. there is tangible reason for sales to be commision based. you could say its just like another regular position. An engineer can also be a sales multiplier if they improve a product yet they dont get a commission. Same thing. Having boots of the field is no justification.

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