Every time I'm asked to do "sales engineering" (a term I hate). What I mean is the sales people are going to demo the product to a prospect and they know there is a feature gap that this particular prospect will depend on. So exec asks us to design a build a bullshit feature that will never actually be launched, as quickly as possible. Nine times out of ten the prospect never eventuates and the effort is wasted.

I understand the need to put your best foot forward for a sales opportunity, but there's nothing I hate more than being asked to build something in the lowest-quality way possible in order to throw it away later. I hate hate hate it.