I recently heard that sales people make more money than engineers and product people. Shocked to hear that but wonder if it’s really true. Not sure how it works at big companies like Google. On levels.fyi it doesn’t seem to be higher but maybe I’m missing something TC 300 #compensation #sales #google
Usually L4 sales makes what L5 eng does. L5 to L6, etc. Obviously there’s no cap on commission so the top performing sales reps in the company are well over $1m based on commission. Usually you’ll see this in cloud and not ads.
why is ad so bad for sales? Ticket size smaller?
It depends. The crux of the issue is that most engineers dont have the softskills and business acumen to be in tech sales like a Sales Engineer, SA, Professional Services/consulting etc. This is not trying to be insulting, its just obvious even though its a sensitive topic. Good SEs are much harder to find than a good engineer only and commissions are typically uncapped (but with decelerators so its not a linear payout multiplier) so you have th potential to get paid more, depending on your territory/accounts/book of business. And you are held to quotas and have typically a 60/40 split or 70/30 split in comp.
Caveat- they have 10x more stress than Eng
go/paycompare
Ya looks like they make much less according to paycompare.
That's just Google. Microsoft is one to look at for enterprise sales.
why would it be shocking, half of them are all gigachads and gigastacys, and by definition have a rare skill set of being able to attract clients
Check the mega comp thread and you'll get the answer. Sales TC is not anywhere close to Engineering/PM
It's a big "it depends". Depends on the company, the economy, and of course, sales talent/business acumen. For the top 3 cloud providers, you can expect on-target-earnings TC of 250-400k, with top performers getting $550k+. For mid-teir companies it's usually less, but could be higher if you get lucky and land a few huge deals.
Sure but l6 Eng at google Makes 550k+ as well.
General rule of thumb is that Sales salaries are 1 level down compared to Eng/Product.
Why does the poll reflect differently?
Because people always think that the grass is greener on the other side
Sales reps don’t make more than engineers except the select few that consistently outperform their quotas. It’s possible for L5 sales reps to make $400k+ at AWS if they outperform. Then again, since Engineering comp is so heavily tied to RSUs, they can capture the upside in stock growth. The highest paid sales rep I’ve seen does $1M-$2M in a year, has a bad year the following year ($250k), and then a decent year ($400k-$500k), and then has another blowout year ($1M-$2M) and jumps from startup to startup every 2-3 years. I’m pretty sure his success isn’t replicable.
this^ management will never allow you to have consecutive years of 1m+ and will constantly revise quota so they dont overpay
I think it depends on a lot but generally at this point, I feel like engineers probably make more.