[praptak]

Multi vendor is even worse than described. I worked for one of the vendors. The incentives make you fight tooth and nail for suboptimal technical decisions that direct money to you rather than the other vendors.

We won the internal bid for a functionality module that ended up being a standalone service called by system X. Vendor X had lost that bid. They convinced the bank that it is absolutely necessary for us to expose a JDBC driver as an interface.

Their engineers were actually pretty cool and we agreed to implement something which made more sense. Unfortunately this decision was blocked. We ended up exposing a simple RPC API via a JDBC driver. I think it had over a thousand methods, almost all of them empty.

[aidenn0]

This has always been the engineer's problem with sales people. You have sales teams visit you from 4 vendors and they all claim that their product will best solve your problem. This means that at least 3 of them are not being truthful.

[TeMPOraL]

Also: most people here probably experienced having to rush some features or deliver facades, because sales team managed to sell something that doesn't even exist in the product, and it needs to be demoed next month.

Given that, consider that when a salesperson from some vendor visits you, they're not likely to be accurate in describing their wares either.

[aidenn0]

Ah yes the "I heard someone say in some internal meeting that this might be possible to do, so I'll sell it" move.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. Also, "I base my understanding of the product on the bullshit some other sales team wrote for the company page two pivots ago" trick. Or, "a thousand or a billion, it's all the same, who counts all these zeros (and what's that 'scalability' word you keep using?)" move.

[aidenn0]

"I base my understanding of the product on the bullshit some other sales team wrote for the company page two pivots ago"

is slightly more forgivable than the other things, particularly if you change "sales team wrote" to "marketing team wrote". In a company with more than one or two products it gets very hard to keep track of what a company actually sells, and the marketing material is at least theoretically a customer-consumable list of that.