>, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality [...]
There is herd mentality yes, but you have to consider that there have been a lot of startups founded by devs who rejected herd mentality and did try to compensate salespeople in a non-standard way. See Pluralsight CEO (a former C# .NET developer) as one example.
The timeline goes like this... When dev worked as an employee at previous company, they hated that salespeople were on commission because it's "unfair". Dev later starts his own company and thus has a chance to implement his own ideas (based on intuition instead of historical evidence) on how to fairly pay salespeople. (I.e. "there's no reason I can't just pay salespeople same as my devs"). He then sees that he can't recruit superstar salespeople or the salespeople he can hire actually can't sell. The market finally "educates" the dev-now-CEO that his intuition and mental framework about salespeople's incentives and motivations were wrong. He relents and switches to the typical commission structure that he really really didn't want to do.
There have been hundreds of years of commerce history showing how salespeople are incentivized by commissions but computer programmers that start companies are an idealistic and stubborn bunch and therefore they want to pay salespeople a different way. There's no risk aversion because they're rebellious against the status quo and are convinced they're right and "everybody else is doing it wrong". Seems like a rite-of-passage that they try their alternative idea and then eventually learn it doesn't work. Ben Horowitz's a16z blog article was aimed at those startup founders (mostly ex-developers) who thought paying commissions was completely illogical and unnecessary.
Your alternative compensation plan idea to pay a delayed annual bonus exactly like the devs is more "fair"; the problem is superstar salespeople aren't interested in it. They don't have to be because they can just work for another company that pays fat commissions.
There is herd mentality yes, but you have to consider that there have been a lot of startups founded by devs who rejected herd mentality and did try to compensate salespeople in a non-standard way. See Pluralsight CEO (a former C# .NET developer) as one example.
The timeline goes like this... When dev worked as an employee at previous company, they hated that salespeople were on commission because it's "unfair". Dev later starts his own company and thus has a chance to implement his own ideas (based on intuition instead of historical evidence) on how to fairly pay salespeople. (I.e. "there's no reason I can't just pay salespeople same as my devs"). He then sees that he can't recruit superstar salespeople or the salespeople he can hire actually can't sell. The market finally "educates" the dev-now-CEO that his intuition and mental framework about salespeople's incentives and motivations were wrong. He relents and switches to the typical commission structure that he really really didn't want to do.
There have been hundreds of years of commerce history showing how salespeople are incentivized by commissions but computer programmers that start companies are an idealistic and stubborn bunch and therefore they want to pay salespeople a different way. There's no risk aversion because they're rebellious against the status quo and are convinced they're right and "everybody else is doing it wrong". Seems like a rite-of-passage that they try their alternative idea and then eventually learn it doesn't work. Ben Horowitz's a16z blog article was aimed at those startup founders (mostly ex-developers) who thought paying commissions was completely illogical and unnecessary.
Your alternative compensation plan idea to pay a delayed annual bonus exactly like the devs is more "fair"; the problem is superstar salespeople aren't interested in it. They don't have to be because they can just work for another company that pays fat commissions.