But the system being sold is usually the result of a team working together - just because one person ended up closing the sale why are they potentially receiving a much larger pay day than those employees supporting the product?

cynically it's because you can quantify the contribution of a sales person - they added xMM to business this quarter. the same kind of itemization/attribution is very difficult for software. the infamous patio11[1] blog post about how to leverage credible bottom line contributions can be used to get paid more as a dev.

but more genuinely i do think sales does bring more value. customers aren't rational actors so closing a deal isn't about features or stats or whatever material a software dev contributes. it's about value prop and trust and meeting needs and all the language sales people use.

[1] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

I agree with that as a possible source - I think a similar sort of justification of value is why extroverts tend to earn more overall and is also partially responsible for the gender pay gap (due to upbringing factors).

I just wonder if there is some way to counter that effectively and also probably couple that with taxation and service provision to make it so that someone working hard at a dying company has a chance at a decent life compared to someone doing nothing at a successful company that gets a wealthy life due to happenstance.

It's interesting to me that the income security of a non-commissioned job is sort of a trade off against profit sharing - where one extreme can leave a hard worker destitute and the other extreme can leave a lazy worker wealthy.

You could argue that the market would want that nobody works hard at a dying company.

I think that's a fair statement, and I think it's well reflected in reality, most employees will judge the company health of various employers - whether it's inclusion in the DOW index, some promotional information about various clients or the condition of the site and investment in long term company health (like a restaurant not having "That one freezer that's always on the fritz so we always just use the other one - oh sure it'll be fixed one of these days, just need to get approval from corporate")

I agree that it definitely shouldn't be that way.

It's a cop out for the sales team to point and say "we made the sale, we're itemizing the value as ours when the whole possibility of the sale is made by the team.

This is why I like an RSU component as an engineer. If our value goes up, I expect to see some of it.

If there is no equity upside, engineers should stop working for bankers.

The sales man gets the glory and they get all the bad as well. If selling was as easy as features then some of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't exist. Also for startups, it's almost required to have a sales person because the market has so many competitors

Once upon a time I think that sales folk working on commission did operate that way - they were mostly independent contractors trying to sell bids for a company and if they failed they took nothing home - most folks in sales these days have a modest to cushy salary that their commission bonus gets applied on top of - in fact their base "total failure contributed nothing" take home is probably higher than that of someone working in the mail room.

So maybe "The sales man gets the glory, but if the bad comes they don't get quite as much." is a more accurate statement.

Because to build the system you need to sell the employees to come join. The power dynamic starts from the get-go.

Why do we tip the server and not the chef?