It's not that they're unable to; it's that the field attracts people who are financially motivated and other companies have compensation structures that reward personal performance.

Top salespeople generally won't work for a fixed salary because they want to make as much as they can, and the way they do that is by having as much of their compensation tied to personal performance as possible.

I personally think more engineers/developers should think the same way, but it's also much harder to directly tie job performance to compensation when contributing to a product.

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diggan 3 days ago | parent [-]

> because they want to make as much as they can

But that's the same no matter if you work in sales, customer support or many other roles, a lot of people just care about the money with little regards to anything else, yet the sales department are the only ones who must have commission?

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bpt3 3 days ago | parent [-]

> But that's the same no matter if you work in sales, customer support or many other roles, a lot of people just care about the money with little regards to anything else,

It's actually not the same for many roles. See the comments from people in this thread alone who scoff at the notion of maximizing compensation. I don't get it personally, but it's not an uncommon thought.

> yet the sales department are the only ones who must have commission?

I think there's a very high likelihood that a salesperson is primarily driven by compensation, and good salespeople will already be working in a commission-driven compensation model elsewhere.

Why would a top salesperson at Dell, HPE, Oracle, or wherever else a hardware salesperson comes from move to Oxide to take less money and completely decouple their compensation from their performance?

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cestith 3 days ago | parent [-]

Even if your intent is to maximize income in customer support, you often don’t have the market option to do that. I have seen (and even worked at) places where chat support, phone support, and support administrators have a quota of chats, calls, or ticket responses and make bonuses based on how much they exceed their numbers. Unfortunately sometimes that results in people updating tickets several times an hour saying things like “we’re still looking into this and haven’t forgotten you” without actually looking into anything.

One place I worked I tried to move the quota system more towards being the final response on a resolve issue, but upper management didn’t want to ever judge whether an issue was resolved even when the customer said they were happy. They did incorporate an NPS query for every interaction, though, and a multiplier against the volume-based quota. Unfortunately that favored people who were good BS artists when lying to the customer about looking into things.

The fallout from the above paragraph was that quality, caring staff would get punished for actually solving customer problems.

	▲	bpt3 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Almost every other role is at least one level removed from putting cash in the company's account, which is what leads to the shenanigans you described with metrics that are a poor proxy for revenue generation (and/or are too easy to game).