[mnemotronic]

In my limited (2 years) experience, the pre-sales engineer, "solution architect" is someone who knows the product and about 85% of the client's environment and requirements. Their job is to say "Our product can meet all your requirements easily. I could code it up in a week." The sales staff moves in and gets the signature, collects the bonus and they and the pre-sales engineers spend the next 5 days on a private beach in the Caribbean. Meanwhile the company's Customer Consulting group sends in a developer and tells them they have a week to understand the requirements and get the thing designed, built, implemented, tested and signed off by the client. By the 2nd day on-site, the developer discovers a customer requirement missed by the pre-sales engineer that will require at least 3 weeks to implement correctly. The developer's boss says "fuck correct and fuck maintainable. Just make it work good enough so they'll let you leave. We're only charging them for a week of consulting". The developer spends 20 hours a day getting something working then leaves the customer with a fragile hodge-podge that mostly works with ideal data as long as the users and IT dept don't do anything unexpected. The developer gets home at 3 am Saturday, does his or her laundry then on Sunday afternoon gets on a plane headed for the next poor schmuck who bought the pre-sales BS.

[loydb]

So, I would describe that as a dysfunctional sales team. I've worked at everything from a 40-person startup to companies with over 100,000 employees. The sales engineers on the teams have been the ones with their hands dirty throughout the entire deal lifecycle, and the first ones on call in the weeks following going live to bug hunt.