I would totally write code for fun and I do! But engineering ... that shit ain’t fun. Most of it is monotonous and boring and rife with managing process and people and working around things you built 2 years ago that no longer fit but you don’t have time to change. For every hour of coding, I am rewarded with 2 hours of engineering. Bleh

Thank you. That puts into words something I've been feeling for a long time now. Building a lean, fast, elegant website with complex business logic and interesting invariants: super fun code. Adding the Nth server side validation check for a zillion similar but subtly different fields: boring engineering.

Commission or Salary is orthogonal to Well Compensated and Badly Compensated.

Those students selling paintball packages in the mall are paid on commission, but they sure aren't being paid well.

(The article isn't "why sales people are paid a lot", it's about why their pay structure is based on a commission structure).

Sure, but in the context of this article engineer style compensation compares poorly. That is, it's essentially a statement that engineers aren't compensated as well as sales workers, and one of the reasons given as to why that's possible is because engineers "have fun" doing engineering work even outside their jobs.

I'm not sure that's really true, though. The really good sales people get compensated really well, but the bad ones do considerably worse than engineers. The flip side of a commission based compensation package is supposed to be that the "fixed" / "base" component is very low.

Yeah, certainly there are a lot of programmers writing software because it's fun for them. They're contributing to FOSS projects because they believe in them. Are they doing what _you_ want them to do just for fun? Probably not.

I agree with your observation, that was a badly broken analogy within the OP. Of course the OP can "guarantee your sales people never sell enterprise software for fun."

But I'll bet those salespeople take more than a passing interest in buying a car, tending an estate sale, dividing up household responsibilities, or negotiating a lease.

What does that have to do with the article or my comment? I write software in my limited spare time for fun, too and I have even had a PR or two accepted by an open source project in my time!

I just don't think that means I should be compensated less well, or told that it means I should appreciate being paid (for my job, obviously) while doing something I love, etc.

You make it sound like engineers are the odd ones out, when in fact they're the norm and sales work is the weird one. Apart from some hospitality jobs and other tipping work, most permanent jobs have a set rate per hour. From the janitor to the financial controller, almost everyone knows exactly what they're going to take home next month.