Yesterday at 2:00 PM, my calendar was forcefully blockedBlockedI'm waiting on another team to do their job, so please stop asking me about it. for a mandatory "technical discovery" call. The CIO had read about a revolutionary new network monitoring platform on a flight, and we were suddenly evaluating it. Twelve senior engineers were summoned to the bridge to vet the architecture.
The burn-rate timer hit $5,200 before the vendor even managed to successfully share their screen.
Here is what actually happened.
The vendor brought an Account Executive, a Customer Success Manager, and a supposedly senior Sales Engineer. For the first forty-five minutes, they didn't show us a single interface or a live environment. Instead, we were subjected to a glossy, 60-slide PowerPoint presentation about their synergistic, AI-driven, frictionless ecosystemEcosystemA convoluted mess of legacy apps that are held together by a single, terrifying bash script.. They used the phrase "single pane of glassSingle pane of glassA mythological dashboard sold by vendors that actually just generates 15 new daily alerts you have to ignore." four separate times.
Finally, with ten minutes left on the clock, they opened the floor for technical Q&A. This is when the illusion completely collapsed.
I unmuted my microphone and asked a very basic, fundamental infrastructure question: "How does your agent handle SSL decryption when routing traffic through our Palo Alto firewalls, and does it natively support BGP peering?"
The Sales Engineer froze. You could hear the sheer panic in the silence. He frantically typed something on his mechanical keyboard—probably messaging his own backend developers in a hidden Slack channel—before clearing his throat.
"That is a great question," he stammered. "Our platform is extremely agile, but I want to make sure I give you the most accurate answer. Let's put that in the parking lot for now, and I will circle backCircle backI am hoping if we ignore this long enough, you will completely forget about it. with you offline."
He didn't know. The product couldn't do it. We were evaluating vaporware—a reskinned dashboard that looked highly futuristic but lacked the basic routing capabilities of a standard switch.
We didn't conduct a technical evaluation yesterday. We paid over five thousand dollars in payroll to watch a salesperson read a marketing brochure to a room full of captive, deeply annoyed engineers.
Total waste generated: $5,200.
Next time a vendor asks to put your fundamental architecture question in the parking lot, just close the meeting. And start the timer.
