I have a few [wealthy] salespeople friends. Most have “commission-only” (0 base) jobs.

Many jobs will start you with a base for a few months, while you build commissions, but they stop it, after a while.

They can also get fired at the drop of a hat. Not much job security.

Sales are easy to convert to incentives. Just take a cut of the sale. It’s not so easy to calculate value from other jobs.

> Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.

In the United States having "zero base bay" is hypothetical. If a full-time employee had no commission payouts they'd be compensated minimum wage as necessary to comply with laws.

Sales jobs often come with a warm-up period with either a higher base salary or they get paid part of their commission target for a number of months regardless of how many sales they make.

> what I don't understand how these magical "sales people" apparently can't work for a fixed salary when literally everyone else can

It isn't that "sales people"[0] can't work for a fixed salary. The good ones just won't because they can find another employer that will pay commission, and they know they will make more with commission than without.

Employers will pay commission because that's how you attract the best sales people, and the best sales people are worth orders of magnitude more to their business than average sales people. Despite how much they earn, in general and compared to their average peers, the best sales people don't cost orders of magnitude more (5x is a more typical spread in tech sales.)

The advantage of 100% commission -- where it is legal -- is pretty obvious from the employer's view point. The company only pays for production. These sales people are commonly (but not always) independent contractors. The benefit for the sales person is a little less obvious, but, generally, they have more autonomy, a simpler comp plan without any caps, and earn more per dollar sold than they would on a base + commission plan.

0 - whether magic or not

> the rest of us can do high quality work without being paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet these individuals cannot

Yes they can not. It is not high quality work but high quality results for sales guy. Developer work is complete once service deployed. It wouldn't be developer failure if user volume doesn't reach x thousands per day on their web service. It would definitely be salesman failure sales does not reach x dollars in certain duration.

Developer equivalent of sales would be to say "I have distributed x sales brochures and call x number of clients this month. My job is done."