[89vision]

> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale"

Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

[whstl]

Quite the opposite, they are experienced with those endless migrations.

French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned".

It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying forever.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.

[talldatethrow]

I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to features.

Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.

But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.

[epr]

> Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.

[raincom]

When you are working with the same sales people multiple times, it is an instance of treated prisoners dilemma. Used car salesman is just one time prisoners dilemma.

[taneq]

They’re not even lying, usually. They just don’t have the expertise to tell the customer exactly what they can’t have. That’s why you have sales people.

[mamoulian]

It infuriates me that all of these aren't met with a 'if it turns out you can't, you need to make it right at your cost' clause.

Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.