I know you probably mean this at least in part in jest, but I've found this to be a pretty common perception in the tech industry. It's probably worth addressing directly.
We want to work with the best engineers, but it's arrogant to assume that that's all that we'll need, or that hiring non-engineering people will cause our culture to deteriorate.
That's not to say that that doesn't happen at some companies (obviously). If you view sales/marketing people as second class, and don't put the same thought into that part of the culture, it'll inevitably be worse. Without a lot of care, it's very easy to build a bad engineering culture too.
While building great software is at the very core of what we do, we won't be able to do everything that we want to accomplish by just hiring engineers. We need people who like talking to users, and people who can describe what Stripe is doing to the world at large, and people who'll help build the countless parts of Stripe that aren't purely about code.
If companies choose to ignore sales, marketing, partnerships, support, and everything else, they should be pretty explicit about the compromise: they're trading off success for narrow-minded solipsism.
We've hired people who aren't full-time engineers, and we'll hire lots more. We want people who can craft both kernel exploits and memorable prose. Those who spend their days working with people instead of code are just as important as anyone else, and their contributions are just as large.
In my experience where this has happened (mostly, but not exclusively at larger companies) the following observations have been true...
Engineering staff have been hired with a range of work experience, i.e. some college hires, some self taught, some with industry background, any combination of the above - the (engineering) corporate culture grows organically as the team matures and works together
Marketing, BizDev, &c staff have been hired with significant industry experience, I don't know where they serve their apprenticeships, but it isn't here wherever here is - they bring a view of corporate culture with them from their previous experience, this doesn't seem to meld well with the growing culture on the engineering side.
I'm sure this isn't ubiquitous, but the tech industry seems to be very keen on nurturing engineers and, in a sense, taking a responsibility for the quality of the engineering community at large, but for other job functions is happy to be, for want of a better word, parasitic, relying on someone else to train those people, whether they be HR, Marketing, BizDev or whatever.
At Parse.ly, we find an easy way of making sales and product teams co-exist nicely is to encourage actual collaboration. For example, some of our engineers built the sales team an engagement dashboard that allows them to track customer usage analytics unified across many of our tracking systems. This makes it clear that the teams have a shared goal and that we can leverage each other's skills to the fullest.
This is really about getting the right people no matter what the role.
If you are a tech company with marketing/sales/BD teams, I have news for you: those people are working at a tech company _for a reason_. They want to be involved in (or at least near) technical things even if they can't contribute in the same way.
Resist the urge to develop isolated tech@ lists. Keep your discussions company-wide even as you grow in non-technical areas. Invite _everyone_ to your technical workshops and reading groups.
At Knewton I've grown tremendously as a marketer, but I've also become interested in the CAP theorem and automated deployment services, learned Git and created some projects, and really sharpened my front-end coding, among other things. I've also had the joy of working with a single developer over a hack weekend to launch a variation of a service that quickly become our top revenue generator and stayed that way for a while.
Get the right people and there's magic waiting to happen.
Being an interactive producer that loves chilling with the engineers, I abhor this comment! That said, we hired a sales guy once that was old school sales, and it didn't end well...
