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On a Friday once, I was sitting in a meeting between my boss and a client.
"Oh, yes. We support that device."
"Oh, we didn't see it in the list."
"Well, you have an older demo version that doesn't show it. We'll send you the updated one on Monday if you like."
"Yes, please"
Guess what I and the hardware driver guy were doing that weekend!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Burying the boss? 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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You got it! (In my mind!) 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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This is so true and it happens all the time.
God is an engineer, he made all good things - with bugs.
The devil is in sales, requires money to get into the state park.
And runs a gift shop outside the gate that sells bug spray at elevated margins.
Bless sales, they have no brains but the gift of gab and get commission on sales and find it just fine to lie. They have a clear conscious because heck, they didn't make the thing. And in a matter of seconds could be selling something else somewhere else if this one doesn't fly. These people are both a dime a dozen but truly good ones are hard to acquire.
Engineering knows absolutely it's a cobbled together POS. - For Pete's sake, don't let em talk to anyone, they'll bring us all down! And if this doesn't fly the poor old sod has to go sell himself to another company without the good looks and gift of bs trying to sell his skills to someone who might not be an engineer. 
So, yeah. 
And look! It's another day.
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"Bless sales, they have no brains but the gift of gab..."
Well, after some 20+ years in the field I'm pretty much convinced that most (better) sales are savvy people, at least in managing their own lives.
They don't have a very complex job, they mostly get rewarded very well for selling some stuff, better than the ones building that stuff in the first place, even if the sales person might not even know the tiniest thing about the product they're selling (sometimes).
They can go out and have dinners with people, play some tennis, visit parties,... and it's all part of working hours, since you're relationship-building.
They grow a really nice (social) network which makes them more and more valuable for future projects/employers, which is the counterpart of the engineer that needs to keep on top of new technologies, investing lots of personal time, just to stay relevant.
Sales get the nicer cars, the better paychecks, the nicer office desk (and office chicks  ), most of the kudos when a project is delivered successfully...
Have seen this happening like ALL of the times in my previous jobs.
Who is the smarter guy?
Me working and learning like crazy, conceiving from scratch the products that companies are selling, for a decent income, but not one that'll ever make me wealthy, or the sales guy, living a pretty relaxed and social life, getting a nice base salary, generous commission and gains 'expertise and relevancy' without consciously investing time or effort in it?
I actually knew a sales guy which was very good at selling (himself).
So my boss hired the guy as the one who was going to generate lots of sales for our company.
After two years, after first being promoted to sales manager (of 2 junior sales), he was let go.
He didn't sell one(!!!) license of the product, nothing at all.
But in those two years, he made more money than me and most of my fellow engineers would make in 10 years of hard work.
I got to hear that two weeks after that he already found another victim where he exactly did the same thing.
In the meantime he can add those former employers onto his CV, since he did work there, building a nice resume, making his profile even more appealing to other companies. And since they'll only know that he's full of sh*t after a year or two/three, he will have made some easy money, expanded his network and CV making it easier to reel in some even bigger fish, increasing his rate.
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If you take away all sales people products would still move, just not at the rate as before. It would come down to the end user choices as to which product suits them best at the time.
If you take away the engineer, everyone starves as there is nothing to sell and know way to make it.
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In the 1980s I worked for a company that built robots and they used Gates & Ballmer's BASIC to run the thing. One guy had printed the whole thing out and it was a stack of fan-folded paper over a foot high. We were finding bugs fairly often, most of which were introduced by us. It was actually fairly handy to have an embedded BASIC interpreter available. Performance could have been better but you really can't/couldn't expect much out of an 8086+8087.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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just sit back relax and let the customer do all the bug testing... just be ready with the shovel when the sh*t hits the fan !
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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My personal reason (as an engineer) why I can't sell stuff is because I factually point out the advantages of my creation. I for the life of me can't wow people with buzzwords, flashy animations and whatever else is used to sell stuff.
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Maybe the parts of the application that work are the ones that solve their problems and the buggy parts are of little use to them.
Most software users have a limited set of work-related problems that they want the new program to solve. Once they start using it they will discover new "solutions" they never dreamed of.
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Nand32 wrote: I'm just imagining how brave & courageous Bill Gates & Ballmer should have been
I see what you did there. Leaving out Nadella speaks volumes about the current state of Windows, and its never-ending stream of problematic patches that keep making the whole thing worse and worse...
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I see Nadella as merely a follower to the two biggies, who ruled the planet during those times.
Nadella is more of a cloud guy, though he was part of early Windows-NT development team.
I guess Azure has been doing reasonably well.
So the courage to release stuff like Windows ME, The award goes to...The Gates & Ballmer. 
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Nadella's an engineer, but it's unfortunate he's all about Azure--but I can't blame him for that since it's doing extremely well.
Ballmer was purely a salesguy, and look at what MS's stocks had been going during his decade (hint: nowhere).
I just wish Nadella brought back to Windows the importance that Gates gave it. Nadella made it clear the platform is no longer important, and they'll go wherever their customers are (paraphrasing, but that's very much what he thinks). That's why we now have things like Office on Android.
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Strange, I'm kind of in the other boat.
Been working on this new functionality for a couple months now. It's pretty solid, certainly enough for testing to get on it.
But the product people keep making non-functional tweaks (wording, placement, etc).
I'm saying, let's get this through testing and release it to the customers, then do iterations on those minor things later, rather than "we have to wait until everything is just so ."
Because, of course, then some other person sticks there nose in, and we're making more tweaks, never getting to the actual release.
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Welcome to the world of Agile.
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Place before grass, short (7)
Bermuda grass (short grass)
Bermuda short(s)
Looks like I messed up again. 
Tomorrow's will be like my older ones, almost solved before being posted.
modified 19-May-20 11:09am.
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Well,
It's not even a valid CCC because the noun shorts is plural only. The plural form of shorts is also shorts. If you would have used the correct definition it would have been solved. Also... before is a container indicator.
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Yes, it's usually shorts, but I've also heard the singular to emphasize a single pair. But grass, short was meant as the definition, with short being more of a bonus.
What would you have considered to be the "correct definition"? I didn't realize that before had to be a container indicator. If you can point me to a site that describes these conventions, I'll read it.
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How many of you bounded their future applications to some cloud provider?
Are those applications are for the long therm or more for the middle-short term?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Not me
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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actually you've identified one of the major problems so many lazy and reckless developers (system architects and down) are REcreating.
Go back just a few years and before, apps were targeted at platforms, (be it server, client, even infra such as databases). slowly people have come around to platform independence.
supposedly the cloud was meant to further drive platform independence,
- and yeah, at the client level that's mostly true
Well guess what the lazy, reckless (and let's face it therein useless) dev teams are doing now are doing at the provider level.
well (not making this political but it clearly demonstrates the point)
just like the world let China not just dominate but virtually own healthcare manufacturing
idiot dev leads are lowering their nuts right into cloud providers specifities.
nothing wrong with choosing a provider, but develop agnostically.
- should become a test requirement
- "what platform do you target" should cease be a question.
pestilence [ pes-tl-uh ns ] noun
1. a deadly or virulent epidemic disease. especially bubonic plague.
2. something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Synonyms: pest, plague, CCP
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I think that not only it is platform dependent now again, it is vendor dependent in the worst way...
As with all (most) of the online services we use/buy today there is no guaranties to continuity or backward compatibility maintenance...
Your service terms (toward you clients) are totally dependent on 3rd parties that are unpredictable at the best...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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