I think a really good depiction of this struggle is Mad Men, surprisingly enough. You've got two factions of symbiotic employees who have more or less differing objectives. (Thankfully, I haven't had to work with any Pete Campbells.)
A lot of this has to do with the way we incentivize/disincentivize various business roles. At your average company, an engineer/developer's #1 goal is "don't fuck up", meaning: take time and caution when developing and releasing things and don't do anything that could break anything (both in the sense of 'throw an error' and 'cause a customer to leave'. The latter is especially important in the enterprise space, where a single customer can be worth more than 10% of your revenues and act as a marketing engine through whitepapers and referrals.)
On the other side of things, sales folks are usually incentivized to sell, sell, sell. They get paid to sell things, so any behavior that doesn't maximize their ability to increase their commission is actively disadvantageous to them. Usually, this incurs a sort of long-term blindness: by devoting three developers to feature ABC for a week and making $X, you take them away from perhaps a bigger feature that might make the company $X * 10. Plus, by making time-sensitive promises to clients/customers you limit the engineer's ability to not fuck up.
The answer to this isn't "sales people are bad and should be more honest" or "engineers should be better at what they do". There are a lot of different strategies: at smaller companies, you'll see ideals like uniting sales and marketing ("marketing" not in the sense of advertising, but in the sense of product development) but the biggest successes I've seen have revolved around shifting those incentives: commissions are simple and easy to tinker with (there's a lot of new interesting literature about 'recurring commissions' which reward salespeople for longer-lasting customers), but your average engineer at a firm deserves a better incentive to produce quality work than "if you don't you will look bad." Sales commissions for engineers may sound weird, but I think if you remove the decades of context there's nothing crazy about the idea that if someone creates a feature that generates $6million for their company, they're entitled to a small slice of that $6million.
One thing I'll caution about, though. One of the more depressing moments I had at a prior gig was realizing that the project I'd been working on (a pretty big overhaul of the 3D interface for a tool) was probably not actually getting us any customers, was probably too complicated for the customers to use (our market was AEC, and the next generation of architects cannot take over fast enough!), and in general that I was getting paid to (seemingly) add no value to the company.
Because I didn't (presumably) see the bigger picture, I got into a pretty sad place as I tried to complete work on something that didn't seem to matter from my limited knowledge of things outside engineering. In short, a little extra knowledge is a dangerous thing; had I known less, I could've happily chugged away, and had I known more, I might've been able to see the point in what I was doing.
So, pegging rewards for engineering efforts to direct profitability could maybe have some bad side-effects.
Comments
I think a really good depiction of this struggle is Mad Men, surprisingly enough. You've got two factions of symbiotic employees who have more or less differing objectives. (Thankfully, I haven't had to work with any Pete Campbells.)
A lot of this has to do with the way we incentivize/disincentivize various business roles. At your average company, an engineer/developer's #1 goal is "don't fuck up", meaning: take time and caution when developing and releasing things and don't do anything that could break anything (both in the sense of 'throw an error' and 'cause a customer to leave'. The latter is especially important in the enterprise space, where a single customer can be worth more than 10% of your revenues and act as a marketing engine through whitepapers and referrals.)
On the other side of things, sales folks are usually incentivized to sell, sell, sell. They get paid to sell things, so any behavior that doesn't maximize their ability to increase their commission is actively disadvantageous to them. Usually, this incurs a sort of long-term blindness: by devoting three developers to feature ABC for a week and making $X, you take them away from perhaps a bigger feature that might make the company $X * 10. Plus, by making time-sensitive promises to clients/customers you limit the engineer's ability to not fuck up.
The answer to this isn't "sales people are bad and should be more honest" or "engineers should be better at what they do". There are a lot of different strategies: at smaller companies, you'll see ideals like uniting sales and marketing ("marketing" not in the sense of advertising, but in the sense of product development) but the biggest successes I've seen have revolved around shifting those incentives: commissions are simple and easy to tinker with (there's a lot of new interesting literature about 'recurring commissions' which reward salespeople for longer-lasting customers), but your average engineer at a firm deserves a better incentive to produce quality work than "if you don't you will look bad." Sales commissions for engineers may sound weird, but I think if you remove the decades of context there's nothing crazy about the idea that if someone creates a feature that generates $6million for their company, they're entitled to a small slice of that $6million.
Excellent points!
One thing I'll caution about, though. One of the more depressing moments I had at a prior gig was realizing that the project I'd been working on (a pretty big overhaul of the 3D interface for a tool) was probably not actually getting us any customers, was probably too complicated for the customers to use (our market was AEC, and the next generation of architects cannot take over fast enough!), and in general that I was getting paid to (seemingly) add no value to the company.
Because I didn't (presumably) see the bigger picture, I got into a pretty sad place as I tried to complete work on something that didn't seem to matter from my limited knowledge of things outside engineering. In short, a little extra knowledge is a dangerous thing; had I known less, I could've happily chugged away, and had I known more, I might've been able to see the point in what I was doing.
So, pegging rewards for engineering efforts to direct profitability could maybe have some bad side-effects.