You may wish to consider your sour taste to be less targeted at Sales and SEs and more around (broken) company-wide processes and (lack of) clout the implementation teams wield.
I'm also on the implementation side (sometimes referred to as professional services), and two immediate thoughts jump to mind:
1) Unless you're a practice manager directly responsible for maintaining a targeted book-to-bill ratio or other quota metric (which usually entails account and long-term customer relationship management), your management should not be throwing you under the bus and exposing you to break that news to the customer. Nothing destroys a booking pipeline faster than customers with mismanaged expectations.
2) This type of behaviour from Sales teams is usually indicative of misaligned incentives. A concrete example of this type of situation could be company in an early "hyper-growth" phase where they only comp on new bookings, and don't comp Sales on contract renewals.
Much of the time sales' over-promising comes as a result of some management or client services functionary that's not a technical product manager but thinks they are insisting that $requirement definitely will be possible once $feature is in place, which definitely will be on time, so no need to communicate with the dev team at all on that.
(It's often the same middle management that omits to let the dev team know the system is supposed to work on IE8 until the client complains.)
Sales commmonly direct their sour taste towards the developers...
I had a long response written out but my browser barfed. Short answer is "yes". Longer answer is "it depends" on the size of the budget/deal, the business function that the manager fulfills, and the size of your organization as a whole:
* Business function: If you're customer facing, most [project|practice|field|support]managers should be sticking their nose into day-to-day projects, especially when a bad message needs to be delivered (e.g. the product we sold you will fall short of your expectations). This is not only because the customer will be incensed, but because there may also be commercial repercussions (e.g. SLA penalties) that you may not be aware of in umbrella master [service|support|license] agreements.
* Deal/budget size: Typically, the larger a manager's deal or budget, the more headcount they have. And the more headcount on a project|team|division, the more intermediate managers there will be to layer the manager in question. Hence, if the deal size is rather large, in most cases managers will not get involved on a day-to-day basis, but should be available for escalations (presuming an account management role for larger deal sizes). If the deal size is usually smaller, more than likely the manager will be more involved (e.g. as a project manager).
* Org size: BDC - not usually. Startup - usually yes.
I'm also on the implementation side (sometimes referred to as professional services), and two immediate thoughts jump to mind:
1) Unless you're a practice manager directly responsible for maintaining a targeted book-to-bill ratio or other quota metric (which usually entails account and long-term customer relationship management), your management should not be throwing you under the bus and exposing you to break that news to the customer. Nothing destroys a booking pipeline faster than customers with mismanaged expectations.
2) This type of behaviour from Sales teams is usually indicative of misaligned incentives. A concrete example of this type of situation could be company in an early "hyper-growth" phase where they only comp on new bookings, and don't comp Sales on contract renewals.