I have at various points in my life accepted 100% variance in pay by choosing to work freelance. It was an acceptable risk because I controlled not just the tech but also the nature of the business, and had reasonable confidence that I could make choices which would result in a satisfactory rate of return on my effort expended. Accepting employment as an engineer while also accepting the financial risk of other people's choices about how to run their business, choices you explicitly have no influence over?? That's not risk, that's an exploitation lottery.
But I would take a job with a 50% chance of making 200k and a 50% chance of making 100k over a job with a 100% chance of making 125k even if the outcome was determined by a coin flip. +EV is +EV whether I am responsible for the impact or not.
My current employer gets over this hurdle by guaranteeing your bonus for 1-2 years, thus giving them time to build trust before the variable compensation gets going.
The reason that this is done is because investment banks tend to have larger revenue swings than many other businesses. Due to this, they want to be able to more easily adjust their costs (of which people are a huge %) relatively easily. It's much easier to adjust bonuses up and down than base salaries.
If you think about what the company is saying, it's "If we fail at our business this year, we'll pay you less despite all your work." Even if that was only a 10% chance, meaning I'd statistically win, I wouldn't work there because they're looking to shit on me for their fuckups.
And it's far more likely that they'll specifically and intentionally defraud you by faking the performance metric, and reward themselves the bonus they "saved" by not paying you.
Surely this would result in extremely high turnover? High turnover employers is probably something you want to avoid anyway, so I don't see this changing the equation much.
In fact you probably shouldn't work with anyone else because whenever you do that your success is, at least in some ways, tied in with their success. Best to work alone all by yourself where you don't ever have to trust anyone else.