The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project.
I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.
It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.
> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.
Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts.
It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.
I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg.
Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.
Yeah, as far as contract negotiations went, you picked the color of the car and got the quote from the dealer.
The real negotiating happened when you handed it off to procurement. Their job was to secure the contract with the terms and features you wanted, and it sounds like they did that. I think that's part of why so many programmers de-value the work of the back office (Legal, Finance, HR, etc). Good back-offices work in the background to get important shit done with minimal, if any, interference to the revenue-generating operations of the business.
I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.
It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.
> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.