[maigret]

The sales folks I know are all very hard workers who often get yelled at for flaws in the software that the engineers didn't care much about. They have an overall view of the product that many engineers should but don't have. They travel a lot additionally to their actual work time which is much bigger than 20 or 30 hours. Also, I have seen engineers being as much guilty of feature creep, if not more than sales. Sales usually want the feature they need for their current customer - fair game (product management must prioritize for the greater good), and they would like the features to be implemented well. Of course their job doesn't scale that well, but they are still very important for major contracts.

Maybe if your sales team is not working this way, you should consider a new employer, the same way many are advocating when the engineering team is broken. Product management, engineering, marketing and sales should work together.

[davidgerard]

Yep. Geeks really need to appreciate that sales, marketing, etc. are special skills, every bit as much as understanding computers is, and you need these people every bit as much as they need you.

[ansgri]

They are actually much more difficult, as are all soft skills that are poorly codifiable. Learning to code is much easier than learning to sell, if only because you can do it alone in a basement with a PC and a book. The reason we engineers often don't get this is because under "natural conditions" more people without special training possess these skills (which means they're widely applicable in everyday life) and almost nobody has to reinvent computer science to survive.