Or get the best of both worlds: Work at a company where engineers receive direct profit sharing for their contributions.

I'm having a hard time picturing this as anything but standard stock/option grants negotiated per employee.

How do you correlate a particular individual's contributions to profit in software? And even if you could really understand how much value everyone was contributing, how would you ever keep a cooperative atmosphere?

If me sharing a good idea with you potentially costs me money, I'm suddenly going to stop talking in meetings.

My company takes precisely this approach, though our business model (we sell data products) and size (we're quite small) definitely makes it easier. There are usually 1-2 employees (engineer and analyst) responsible for a given product so calculating their respective contribution and profit-sharing on a per-product basis is quite straightforward.

Exactly. The highest paid tech workers are certainly in sales, from an outlier perspective, when you include commissions on those million-dollar deals. The fact that the text "sale" does not even appear in the article makes the whole analysis suspect.

Where? I have been doing inside sales for 3 years. Looking to move.

Enterprise hardware sales is incredibly lucrative, and even more cutthroat.

The closer you are to the actual customer the more money you'll make. The sales guy at the VAR who actually knows the customer makes the most, followed by the sales guy at the manufacturer, then any SE's, then maybe inside guys.

I'm very close to the customer, but am slanging Mortgages. Obviously I am on Hacker News so I'm really a tech guy, know my way around a Linux box. Got into this field for the money, want out desperately. I get so tired of haggling over interest rates.

Move to outside sales. Or sales engineering.