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Comment by octo_t | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'.

90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.

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As a developer, I've been on the receiving end of "we promised the client we could do this, and they've already paid us, so get to it" more times than I can count... it's my least favorite salesman trait, by far.

And the salesman gets a nice commision from the sale while the developer gets to work an extra 20 hours that week at no extra pay.

New rule: developers, let's demand 50% of the sales team's commission for contracts sold on promised features.

While I'm not defending the practice of vaporware, it's not the root of the problem here. The root of the problem is that if you have a policy of working unpaid overtime, unless you are lucky in finding only wise or scrupulous employers, your life is going to be trashed.

To you, it is completely irrelevant whether the reason your employer ordered you to trash your life was because the salesman sold vaporware, or because of the phase of the moon; the outcome for you is the same regardless of the reason the order was given. You have to change your policy of obeying such orders.

Same here; the worst is when they want a feature that's technically impossible.

its even worse when you're in the meeting with the client when the sales people say you've already got this feature and you're thinking "no, no we don't dear go this is going to take a massive database change and....."

That's not even remotely my least favorite, as at least salespeople who overpromise too much tend to get caught out.

My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.

We do this all the time for features on our roadmap, if a high level client wants to "sign up" and basically pay for the new feature we move it up in the roadmap.

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