[trout]

I've been on break/fix and on the Sales Engineer side and know both - there's never a single side to these things.

Sales Engineers in particular don't want to sell something dishonestly - it opens the company up to risk and it hurts their credibility, particularly if you sell multiple products.

There are a few reasons I can think of:

1. The technical people that run the current implementation didn't put their requirements into the sales process.

2. Some of those features really don't matter to the business and were fodder.

3. The requirements were listed, but not accurately or with enough depth.

4. The Sales team didn't have enough knowledge (or training) to know the difference - or inaccurate documentation.

5. It was roadmapped close enough to implementation and including delays to go ahead anyway.

6. The competitor claims to have this feature but theirs is broken also, so it's a race to who can sell broken stuff faster - because nobody can truly do it.

The people and the companies that support this exist certainly - just not for very long.

[johnward]

I see different incentives within my own organization. Sales and sales engineers makes commission so they want to close the deal no matter what. I deliver a specific product so I just want to get it done and stay under budget. Another consulting group handles the long term customer relationship so they are more inclined to give away free work for future relationship building that I am not incentivized to want to do.