except, no
Obvious troll is obvious, but by all means, let me expand.
Performance based pay is great, *in theory*.
The problem with it is that it is almost never implemented well. In order to implement it well, obviously, you have to evaluate performance properly. This is hard, however, and most companies don't bother.
The problem with paying salespeople on commission is that you are effectively paying them based entirely on their sales. This seems fine at first glance, but it really isn't.
If you work on a retail floor, and you're paid basic rate plus commission, then assuming you're a rational actor, your goal is to spend as much of your time as possible selling the most expensive things you possibly can.
You have absolutely no immediate incentive to *help* anyone in any way if it does not immediately lead to a high value purchase. There's zero mileage for you in helping a customer find something they're looking for if some other salesperson will get the sale. There's zero mileage for you in helping a previous customer get the thing you sold them working. Why would you do that? You're not getting paid for it.
I know people who work retail (I don't. I work for Red Hat. No, I'm not in the bottom 10% of anything.), and I've heard them express _exactly_ these sentiments.
Of course, in the long run, having all your customer interaction done by people who have zero motivation to help those customers in any way at all besides to sell them expensive stuff is not good for your company. But figuring out a more sophisticated system of performance measurement - or even, shock, not using something that's based purely on number crunching but *actually having real people evaluate each other's performance* - is much more complicated, so lots of companies don't bother. And then they wonder why people hate shopping at their stores, and rank them so low on customer satisfaction surveys.
To take another example, I *have* worked in tech support, and the company I worked at - and many others - evaluated the 'performance' of phone monkeys based almost entirely on the number of calls they were able to handle in a given unit of time.
This is an even more egregiously dumb method of 'performance' evaluation. Any phone monkey with a quarter of a brain figures out in short order that their goal is to get the customer off the phone in the shortest amount of time possible. If your problem seems remotely complicated or difficult it is in my best interests to either fob you off on some other department, fake up a reason to get you to hang up to try out some bogus fix which is unlikely to work, or simply hang up on you. Not surprisingly, this means the actual *experience* of people who call into places which evaluate performance based on call time is...highly unlikely to be optimal, let's say.
But figuring out a system which actually 'measures' how well any given person provides customer satisfaction is a hell of a lot more difficult than feeding raw call time statistics into an Excel macro to produce a pretty bar chart on the desk of some middle-management pencil pusher who can then fire the bottom 5% of people on the chart, so hey, that's what middle management is going to do.
Summary: in theory, performance related pay is not a bad idea in many cases. But, especially in large companies, it's all too rarely implemented in a way which actually measures performance in a way which is a) actually meaningful and b) actually beneficial to the company over the long term. It's far more often implemented in an overly simplistic way which results in those whose 'performance' is being measured gaming the system in ways which is clearly, objectively detrimental to the actual experience of the company's customers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
