It's that when it comes down to actually making it work, it's the engineer that has to provide a working solution to the specification. Not a figurative engineer with years of experience and knowledge. The actual person that has the task. Pretty much everyone else in the chain has to make assumptions about what is possible, in what time frame, with what resources. Yes, the more experience you have, the better you get at doing that.
But trust me when I say that all too often, even product engineers for million dollar figure products, have little idea if X is possibly in time Y until they actually try and do it. (I've worked at multiple companies with multi-million product licenses, and seen it at all of them). Sure, a few of the delivery engineers had a much better idea. But there was no way any of the analysts, project managers, and especially not the sales engineers, had any clue about the time. You'd get answers from 1/10th Y through to 10 x Y - 10000% variance.
It's that when it comes down to actually making it work, it's the engineer that has to provide a working solution to the specification. Not a figurative engineer with years of experience and knowledge. The actual person that has the task. Pretty much everyone else in the chain has to make assumptions about what is possible, in what time frame, with what resources. Yes, the more experience you have, the better you get at doing that.
But trust me when I say that all too often, even product engineers for million dollar figure products, have little idea if X is possibly in time Y until they actually try and do it. (I've worked at multiple companies with multi-million product licenses, and seen it at all of them). Sure, a few of the delivery engineers had a much better idea. But there was no way any of the analysts, project managers, and especially not the sales engineers, had any clue about the time. You'd get answers from 1/10th Y through to 10 x Y - 10000% variance.