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Paying Engineers like Salespeople – Arman Hezarkhani, Tenex
Takeaway
In the AI era, paying engineers per accepted story point directly aligns them with using AI tools well — sales-style variable comp for builders.
Summary
- 10X co-founder pays engineers per accepted Jira story point (flat base + quarterly variable) — mirrors how clients pay 10X for delivered story points.
- Walks through the failure modes of hourly (no upside), fixed-bid (sandbagged estimates), salary+bonus (no incentive), and equity (lottery-ticket failure rate) compensation.
- Model has attracted former founders, ML researchers, and ex-NASA engineers; team ships fast while maintaining quality via architecture-design-doc gating before tickets.
- Concrete client examples include a Times Square billboard self-serve product built by AI-engineer + strategist pairs.
compensationai-engineeringhiring
Original description
Most software teams still run on an outdated unit of measure: hours, days, years. That single choice misaligns every incentive—clients want fewer, engineers want more, and everyone loses speed. At Tenex, we threw the hourly model out and built an outcome-based system where we pay and charge per story point, tying incentives directly to shipped value. In this talk, I’ll break down exactly how it works—the math, the cultural shifts, the AI tooling that makes it possible, and the results we’ve seen across real client projects. You’ll leave with a blueprint for running a high-trust, high-velocity engineering team that scales output, not overhead. Speakers: Arman Hezarkhani | CTO, Tenex https://x.com/ArmanHezarkhani https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahez/ https://armanh.com/