It'll be interesting if the equity ends up valuable enough to diminish the relative importance of the cash compensation. Some may actually benefit from lower employee compensation depending on equity ownership. The post touches on equity, but I'd be interested to know more, especially due to potential conflicts of interest of larger equity owners benefitting from lower employee compensation

It’s fascinating to see how many comments here insist rewards must be extrinsic for some kind of score keeping or personal advancement, when bulk of research suggests intrinsic rewards are far more effective provided nobody is exploiting the system.

This suggests (a) rewards for better outcomes can lie in the space of the team asking that out-performer to take on more accountability, so the individual can be on a personal growth, leadership, responsibility path, while the rising tide of performance lifts all boats. And at the same time, that seems to need to be accompanied by (b) fairness, a recognition the team is not a charity and nobody can be slacking and remain part of the effort, such that intrinsic rewards are not undermined.

There’s an opt-in aspect to make this work — not everyone wants to be on the starship Enterprise exploring new worlds without getting paper tokens to count their score “against” peers by. Even if the crew agrees Picard should be captain and have the quarters closest to the bridge, for some folks that’s not enough, they need to “beat” other humans instead of enjoying making the Enterprise better.

FWIW, I categorically disagree on sales commissions. Sales commission culture seems generally toxic to founder values. I’ve never seen a commission structure that doesn’t get gamed in ways beneficial to sales people at either customers’ or the firm’s expense and to its cultural or mission detriment, once the commission plan begins to scale.

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All that said, if there are graduated pay scales, instead of a communal collective at utopian parity, it seems these should be less graduated by org chart level, and more by “toil vs. automation”. How to turn individual or collective labor into individual or collective annuity?

We (tech industry labor) haven’t really grappled with this yet, though you see it upstream of us, in valuations multiples differing between service where an hour of work is needed for a dollar of income versus “-as-a-service” where some code can be run as a utility.

This is what’s behind “do things that don’t scale”: figuring out how to scale these things, how to take the 1:1 toil part out of the equation, replace it with a multiplier or better zero it out.

The craftspeople able to figure these scaling problems out, automate them, are able to generate disproportionate future value per hour, and arguably should be compensated accordingly (think NPV), else in today’s typical system that value accrues to the company management where, frankly, most “management” is probably glorified toil.

It is indeed fascinating how many of the comments here run to extrinsic rewards -- and makes me want to immediately ask the follow-up for so many of the posters here: why are you an engineer? Maybe another way at getting at the same question: if you could be on any engineering team at anytime in history, what do you pick and why?

I can tell you from a year of observing Oxide: team members inspire one another. Someone sees someone else demo'ing something exciting, and they are inspired to themselves drive to an exciting demo -- not to compete with them, but out of their own sense of teamwork and mission. And to the degree that we're seeking extrinsic rewards beyond satisfied customers, frankly nothing feels better than to hear a colleague say: "Wow, that's really neat!"

I love this response. I've been asking this question a lot lately (to myself and others): why are you a solution engineer?, why are you here ($curjob)?, where would you want to work, and why? etc.

Sprinting to a coworker's desk (or chat thread in COVID times) and helping them out on whatever roadblocks they run into is pure fentanyl, straight to the jugular. Even if it's just providing moral support by looking over their shoulder, indeed nothing feels more rewarding than hearing a colleague say: "wow, thanks wonderingse!"

Oxide's mission, principles, and values mirror my own, almost comically so. It seems a bit early to ask but:

When will Oxide start hiring pre-sales solution engineers?

One day in the not-too-distant future! We intend to build a big company here, and while that will certainly take some time, we are going to want everyone to find a calling in our mission, principles, and values. So please stay tuned!