I worked as Consultant for several years and instead of a daily rate, always proposed for each of my large projects, that companies would pay me 0.5% of the money my activities made the company or 0.1% of the money I saved the company.

Not one ever took up on this offer...

Probably because it's ambiguous and opens them up to legal headaches when there's disagreement over how much was made or saved.

No. I always made it very clear.

Example: Show me your current budget for your main data center. Let me show a proposal for a Cloud move that will keep equivalent or better quality of service, including training and while defining KPI's for success.

Seems like that would quickly turn into a game of reverse engineering shitty KPIs, would it not?

I agree some play the game of working for the KPI's as defined.

The main point of the proposal was always clear up front. I was not the one deciding on KPI's it was a joint choice.

For the SAME business applications and SAME business processes:

- At the end of a quarter you either spend less OR more with your infra costs including required teams.

- At the end of a quarter you either have more uptime OR less uptime.

- At the end of a quarter you either spend more on licenses OR less.

Some KPI's are somewhat objective.

> The main point of the proposal was always clear up front. I was not the one deciding on KPI's it was a joint choice.

Which is exactly the parent's issue with their statement "I always make it clear". Many rev share negotiations break down quickly due to the nature of these deal:

- The profit maximizing buyer of said services has little incentive to pay you your "fair" share, EVEN if they do in fact create more revenue because of said services effect. They'll find every way to pay you as little as possible within the bounds of your contract.

- A buyer of said services rarely will rarely let you into their financial systems to validate. Even if they do, financials notoriously are easy to manipulate/game (ever heard of Adj. EBITDA?). The overhead of financial clarity is rarely worth the headache. Heck, most businesses internal operations rarely can create clear ROI their projects when they used internal resources much less using external resources.

- There are so many hidden variables that it's nearly impossible to control for your impact. Let's say you help reduce a company's EC2 instances from 10 to 7. Savings...great! Now the company grows and they need 8 EC2 instances. Did you still save them money? Down the rabbit hole we go...

I get what you're saying but you're living in a vacuum if you think you can universally demand that type of contract. They're possible but require the stars to align.

Note - I'm talking specifically about professional services / consulting work.

Would you have agreed to a deal that called for you paying _them_ if those KPIs were missed?

Penalties are standard in many Consulting contracts. Fixed price contracts are also frequent.

Yea because people want a single invoice and to be done with you. No one wants to pay a ongoing expense, nor an expense that isn’t fixed. Math/accounting is way harder.

Except when is to reward the board ;-)

unless you work in sales, it is very hard to prove how lines of code can translate in more money for the company. maybe easier in startups but nearly impossible in big corps where everyone is just a cog in the machine

You don't need to prove it. You just need to justify the number you show.

For example: you build a feature to notify customers via email that they have a balance due. The email includes a link with UTM tracking stuff. You also have metrics as to who pays and when. So now you can say "X number of people paid their balance within Y hours of an email being sent out, and within Z minutes of the email linked being clicked" and total up the amount of balances paid. Sure, your feature isn't 100% responsible for enabling that balance to be collected, but it deserves to say it contributed to a portion of the collected balance value.

I wouldn't say "nearly impossible", although big companies do tend to have a few teams in that position. Everywhere I've worked, large or small, there have been a substantial number of engineers who justify their work in terms of money for the company and rocket up the career ladder because of it. (And I've seen a lot of seemingly "cog in the machine" tasks that have large dollar amounts attached as far as management is concerned.)