Sales reps and programmers can either fight external obstacles to earn their pay, or convince you, the founder, to pay for their time regardless of results; make the internal path harder.

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Employees naturally choose the easiest path to compensation. Sales reps and programmers can either overcome external obstacles (selling to customers, delivering code) or internal ones (convincing founders to pay for time regardless of results). Founders should make the internal path harder by implementing performance-based compensation tied to tangible outcomes like merged pull requests, not time spent. This forces teams to focus on solving real problems rather than selling excuses.

You Are the Low-Hanging Fruit

I don’t know about sales but measuring software engineer’s work by PRs is a terrible idea.
Anyways, since we talk about selling and low hanging fruits, remember that you also have to take some effort to convince an engineer that his precious time is worth spending on your business. I mean if you seek for good developers, not some low hanging fruits…

I read the whole article again, instead of just skimming it and it only got worse and worse.
<blockquote>
What you get is a technical team focused on resolving external problems. The team will advance because it will be pointless to retreat. You simply won’t pay them for their time. No matter how many times they repeat “I was working hard the entire weekend.”
</blockquote>
This is just stupid. This means, that no more complicated issue will ever be solved, because every engineer will give up after a couple of hours, since it does not pay. Simple as that. Now, if you hire some hypothetical genius engineer, who can solve any issue within hours, then he knows what he’s worth and even if you only pay him for those so-called “results”, he will be still extremely more expensive, than a normal Senior, who you’d pay the time regularly for.
Is the article meant to be taken sincerely or is it a satirical piece? The advice in it is really bad and I advise readers to not take it literally, at all.

Bad idea. If you do this, there are a lot of tricks to only do work, that seems useful, since you need your money you should’ve gotten anyway in the first place and you will never fix any long standing backlog stuff, which has its own importance, because according to the non-technical money provider, it isn’t important, urgent or useful enough to justify the so-called “performance-based” pay.
Leave good engineers alone, they know what to do. Stop trying to ruin everything by trying to optimise, where optimisation just leads to many more problems, even when it seems on paper like you’re either saving money or creating bigger results.

The author is quoting Stalin to promote a dystopian management style… Dear Lord…
Since the article is published from Moscow I’m afraid it’s not satirical at all

All I got from this is that I would never work for this guy.